Thanks to @ReviewofPE for publishing Güney Işıkara's and my paper on price-value deviations. We calculate labor values in 42 countries, the biggest collection yet. The relationship to market prices is robust, much like the labor theory of value predicts.

RT @ingridharvold: I spoke with @adnanahusain about the new paper on Unequal Exchange by Nievas & Piketty. I lay out their contributions an….

RT @heimbergecon: Nice summary of Keynesian macro paradoxes: why microeconomic morals don't match macroeconomic outcomes. .

@hetecon If you are interested in this work, in October our book "Marx's Theory of Value at the Frontiers" will ship, with one chapter on international value transfers and imperialism, including extensive empirical analysis:.

Last weekend I attended @hetecon's #AHE2025 in London to present Güney Işıkara's and my research on international value transfers. Michael Roberts nextrecession blog covers the presentation, and many others, better than I ever could:.

RT @syllabus_tweets: @patrickmokre @CriticalDev This essay is featured in this week's edition of the Best of Political Economy: https://t.c….

Tomorrow, #ahe2025 starts in London. Josephine D Baker, Tomas Rotta and José Alejandro Coronado and I put together a four-session stream on quantitative political economy which brings together 16 outstanding and exciting contributions. Come and check it out!.

The framework also accommodates the effects of non-production industry value capture (think of finance and trade) and capital exports, for which datasets like the one by Nievas and Piketty are crucial. The book cannot be preordered yet, but here it is 📌

In our upcoming book, "Marx's Theory of values at the frontiers", we gather a large set of labor values, production prices and market prices. We not only quantify value transfers, but also distinguish the impacts of value compositions of capital, and rates of surplus value. 10/.

There is an alternative! A Marxist analysis roots value transfers in production and exchange. Equalization of profit rates, and non-equalization of wage rates, gives higher prices than values to more capitalized and lower exploitation rate industries. 9/.

Consequently, their policy recommendations remind us of IMF or World Bank white papers: they propose structural reform of trading bodies and unified debt markets to enable market-driven convergence. 8/.

While authors from Marxist, unequal exchange and dependency backgrounds understand value transfers as expressions of economic international inequalities embedded in the capitalist market mechanism, Nievas and Piketty treat them as a series of one-off market distortions. 7/.

This has little to do with unequal exchange, and consequently the seminal contributions in the field, by Emmanuel, Amin or Mauro Marino are absent from the reference list. Their concept is closer to the structural tradition, but Prebisch, Singer or Lewis aren't cited either. 6/.

Instead they run counterfactual simulations where they cancel out things like price differentials between raw materials and manufactured goods. Instead of grounding the differences in some theory of price, they treat prices as fully flexible bargaining outcomes. 5/.

The unequal exchange literature deals with equal values traded at differential prices, and ensuing value transfers between countries. Nievas and Piketty ignore that literature, separating the term from its intellectual genealogy (which Joan Robinson called bastardization). 4/.

The harmonized and globespanning data will enable great contributions on questions of international inequalities, exploitation, dependency and unequal exchange. But we argue that their own interpretation of the data is not one of these great contributions. 3/.

No questions asked: the data collection effort and resulting dataset are impressive. Nievas and Piketty gather data on trade in goods as well as services, direct transfers (such as colonial tributes), foreign investment and cross-border income flows over two centuries. 2/.

Güney Işıkara and I read Nievas and Piketty's new paper, “Unequal Exchange and North-South Relations”. While their empirics are groundbreaking, we felt they get unequal exchange wrong. We also have an upcoming book we think provides the framework for a better interpretation. 🧵.

RT @CriticalDev: NEW POST: What's actually the problem with @gatonievas and @PikettyWIL's take on Unequal Exchange from a radical/Marxist p….

RT @Srishting: For the 25th anniversary of the Journal of Agrarian Change, a set of responses to “What is the Value of Value for Agrarian S….

RT @SixEv4: 📢 Extended deadline: Submit your abstract for the 14th Young Economists Conference (2–3 Oct 2025, Linz) by 26 May!.🎓 For MA/PhD….