World Income, Inequality and Murder

Michael Höhle

We follow up on last weeks post on using Gapminder data to study the world’s income distribution. In order to assess the inequality of the distribution we compute the Gini coefficient for the world’s income distribution by Monte Carlo approximation and visualize the result as a time series. Furthermore, we animate the association between Gini coefficient and homicide rate per country using the new version of gganimate.

Introduction

One of the main messages of the Chapter ‘The Gap Instinct’ of the book Factfulness is that there is no justification of the ‘we’ and ‘them’ classification of countries anymore, because ‘they’ have converged towards the same levels in key indicators such as life expectancy, child mortality, births per female. The difference between countries is, hence, not as many imagine it to be: there is less inequality and no real gap. While reading, I became curious about the following: what if countries became more equal, but simultaneously inequality within countries became bigger? This was also indirectly a Disqus comment by F. Weidemann to the post Factfulness: Building Gapminder Income Mountains. Aim of the present post is to investigate this hypothesis using the Gapminder data by calculating Gini coefficients. Furthermore, we use the country specific Gini coefficients to investigate the association with the number of homicides in the country.

Leer más: http://staff.math.su.se/hoehle/blog/2018/07/09/gini.html

 

 

‘Τhe end of the globalization myth and the continuing importance of imperialist rivalries’, S.Mavroudeas – Peking University, School of Marxism — Stavros Mavroudeas Blog

I just returned from Beijing where I participated in the International Symposium ‘Modern China and the modernization of Developing Countries’, organized by the School of Marxism of the Peking University (12-13 October 2019). I presented a paper titled ‘Τhe end of the globalization myth and the continuing importance of imperialist rivalries’. An expanded version of […]

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Labor values and prices of production: a new theoretical and empirical approach on the transformation problem

Mario Montesino, Armando Álvarez, Juan José López and Meraris López*

Abstract

This article inquires the relationship between the market prices and the analytical prices of the labor theory of value in El Salvador’s economy between 1990 and 2006. A new methodological perspective is proposed for the labor value and the production’s prices, measured with an emphasis on the distinction of the labor’s complexity of Marx and the importance of the full payment of the value of labor power. The data utilized for these estimations comes from El Salvador’s input-output tables from 1990 to 2006, obtained through the transformation of the supply and use tables with the model B of Eurostat. The article’s novelty is the theoretical approach for the values and production’s prices measuring; moreover, is one of the first research on this topic in a Central American country. The fundamental Marxian’s variables obtained are compared with the approach used by Shaikh (1984, 2016); Ochoa (1984) and Guerrero (2000); Sánchez, Álvarez and López (2017). Furthermore, the correlation coefficient between the market prices and the values is calculated.

(*) Department of Economics, Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas (UCA), El Salvador

I. Introduction

During the eighties, the analyses that pretended to archive the labor value’s empirical measuring from the Marxist theory began to generalize. These analyses were based on Sraffa (1966) and Pasinetti’s (1984) approaches which proposed to use Input-Output Tables (IOT) and matrix algebra to measure labor-values, direct prices and prices of production. In this manner, the debate about the “transformation problem” provided new analytical tools and methodologies to continue looking for answers for Marx’s (1981) unsolved problems on Capital’s Volume III.

In this spirit, we present in this article a new proposal about this transformation process that would be appointed as “New Approach”. This proposal has focused on Marx’s distinction about simple and skilled labour and the importance of full payment of the labor power’s value. Moreover, this proposal has been elaborated considering El Salvador’s productive and labor market reality in specific, but Central and Latin-American countries’ in general, since our countries share many characteristics and limitations. Is plausible to think that this new approach fits better with our own economic conditions.

The second section of this article presents one proposal to the transformation problem, developed by Anwar Shaikh, Diego Guerrero and Edward Ochoa. This methodology will be the comparison point with our own proposal. The third section presents the “New Approach” methodology to this problem, explaining the main differences from Shaikh, Guerrero and Ochoa’s proposal in specific, but with others solutions to this problem in general. The forth section presents the data’s sources used in this research and also the methodology to calculate matrices and vectors required for labor-value’s measuring.

The fifth section presents the results from measuring labor-values and direct prices with both methodologies applied to El Salvador’s economy from 1990 to 2006, using the Input-Output Tables (OIT), while the direct prices are compared with the market prices to establish which methodology fits better with the Salvadorian market behavior. Also, the fundamental Marxian variables are calculated to study El Salvador’s economic behavior. Finally, conclusions and final thoughts are presented about the new approach’s explanatory capacity about the Salvadorian economy.

Evolución de la Productividad en El Salvador desde la perspectiva de la Teoría del Valor Trabajo

Fragmento del ASES (2017). Departamento de Economía UCA. (2017). Análisis Socioeconómico de El Salvador, año 2017. El Salvador: Universidad Centroamericana,  José Simeón Cañas.

César Sánchez

   Esta sección tiene como objeto determinar el crecimiento de la productividad desde la perspectiva de la teoría del valor trabajo de 1990 a 2006 con las tablas insumo producto de El Salvador. El primer objetivo es establecer un marco teórico que derive en un concepto mensurable. El segundo, es mostrar que esta medida está relacionada con la llamada productividad del trabajo, una medida con ciudadanía en la teoría del valor marxista,  tal y como lo apunta Valle (1991). Tercero, se propone descomponer a la productividad, de un lado, por las contribuciones del trabajo y capital, y  por otro, por las contribuciones por ramas de actividad. La investigación encuentra que: 1) la productividad, ha crecido para el periodo en 2.9%, la productividad total de los factores y la laboral lo han hecho en 3.3% y 3.6% respectivamente, es decir, hay bastante similitud en estas cadencias y 2) que el factor principal de ese aumento lo soporta el ahorro de trabajo el cual contribuye con 65%, el capital lo hace con el 35% y 3) las ramas que más contribuyen están en servicios primero y en la manufactura después; al parecer, el sector agrícola ha tendido a contribuir negativamente a la productividad agregada.

Aunque las fuentes estadísticas por ahora no permiten realizar un estudio más amplio, y aunque en sentido estricto el Banco Central de Reserva, BCR, presenta cuadros de oferta y utilización y no matrices de insumo producto (MIP), y aunque aquellas están valoradas a precios de comprador y no básicos, con todo, las estadísticas permiten realizar una primera valoración de la productividad y su descomposición.

La estructura de la sección es la siguiente, primero se esbozan las definiciones sobre valor y productividad, conceptos intrincados dentro de la teoría del valor trabajo, en segundo lugar se formaliza la media anterior, demostrando como a partir de las MIP es totalmente posible determinar el valor sectorial y agregado y observar su evolución temporal, además se muestra como en 1990 los valores explican bien a los precios de mercado, lo cual demuestra la fortaleza de la teoría del valor y afianza el terreno para poder estimar la evolución en el tiempo de los valores ramales en El Salvador de 1990 a 2006. En tercer lugar se observa la productividad sectorial y agregada. En cuarto, se descompone la productividad por las contribuciones del trabajo y capital, se mostrará como los resultados obtenidos son consistentes con el crecimiento de la productividad laboral salvadoreña para este periodo. Finalmente se esbozan algunas conclusiones.

La desigualdad y la polarización de ingreso en El Salvador, 1985-2018

César Sánchez

(fragmento del reporte ASES 2019, de la Universidad Centroamericana, UCA).

5.8. La desigualdad y la polarización de ingreso en El Salvador, 1985-2018

5.8.1. Resumen

La siguiente sección da un seguimiento y continuidad al estudio de la desigualdad y polarización en El Salvador. Los resultados de esta investigación son: (1) con los datos oficiales sigue cayendo la desigualdad del ingreso de los hogares, en buena medida porque cae la participación de los tres deciles más ricos; (2) el índice Palma coincide en la declinación de la desigualdad con el índice de Theil o Gini; (3) la polarización, en cambio, muestra que la distancia entre ricos y pobres se mantiene; (4) al reestimar el decil X, el más rico, la concentración muestra un escenario diferente, la distribución del ingreso con el índice de Theil, apunta niveles crecientes del 45 % en 1991,  a 56 % en 2018 y (5) hay evidencia de enormes desigualdades de ingreso a nivel regional municipal en El Salvador en 2007.

El gráfico 5.8.1 muestra la distribución porcentual del ingreso total de hogares de los deciles en El Salvador para un amplio periodo.

Gráfico 5.8.1. Distribución porcentual del ingreso por decil. El Salvador. 1985-2018

Fuente: elaboración propia con datos de Minec y Digestyc (varios años).

Nota: el año 2018 implicó pronosticar cada decil, y luego restringirlos a que sumen la unidad.

Recessions, monetary easing and fiscal stimulus

Michael Roberts Blog

As the stock markets of the world gyrate up and down like a yo-yo, all talk in the financial media is on whether a new global recession is coming and when.  The financial pundits search for economic or financial indicators that might guide them to tell.  The favourite one is the ‘inverted bond yield curve’.  This is the difference in the annual interest rate that you get if you buy a government bond that has a ten-year life (the maturity before you get your money repaid) and the interest rate for buying either a three-month or two-year bond.

The curve of interest rates for differently maturing bonds is usually upwards, meaning that if you lend the government your cash (ie buy a government bond) for ten years you would normally expect to get a higher interest rate (yield) than if you lent the government your money for just three months. …

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A global manufacturing recession — Michael Roberts Blog

As we enter October, the global recession is with us – in manufacturing. The PMI manufacturing activity indexes for most of the major economies are below 50, the threshold for expansion or contraction. These are only surveys of corporate managers asking them about production, sales, employment etc. But PMIs have been reasonably accurate indicators of […]

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