Review of Radical Political Economics

Argentina’s right-wing shift in the 2015 presidential election concluded twelve years of center-left rule. The elected president, Mauricio Macri, claimed that the economy would experience normalization of existing imbalances and recover its strength in a “new political era.” However, the new administration quickly restored the dominance of neoliberal economic policies through a comprehensive set of initiatives, which centrally included the return to international financial debt and equity markets and submission to the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) rules. This article analyzes Argentina’s external-debt-growth process and discusses its objectives and long-term effects. This paper posits that the indebtedness process carried out by the Macri administration—and its modality—not only increased the relevance of financial capital in the Argentine economy but also structurally conditioned any future nonorthodox alternative path of development. This outcome cannot be understood without taking into account the deliberate role of the United States, the IMF, and the top companies that operate in Argentina, as well as the complicity of many political sectors.

JEL Classification: H63, F34, F63

In the United States, the military is the primary channel through which many are able to obtain supports traditionally provided by the welfare state, such as access to higher education, job training, employment, health care, and so on. However, due to the nature of the military as a highly gendered institution, these social welfare functions are not as accessible for women as they are for men. This amounts to a highly gender-biased state spending pattern that subsidizes substantially more human capital development for men than for women, effectively reinforcing women’s subordinate status in the US economy.

JEL classification: B54, B52, Z13

In this article, I analyze the paradoxical development of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce in China by investigating three dimensions in its ecosystem: the rent extraction of the platform capital, the labor-intensive mini-enterprises under the demand-driven supply chain of e-commerce, and the widespread commodification and dispossession. I argue that its development has deepened and broadened the exploitative relationship among various forms of labor and capital. To a great extent, although the largely unregulated development of e-commerce has created more employment and provided opportunities for some previously marginalized places and social groups, especially during the early stage, it has quickly engendered malicious competition, notorious counterfeiting, and shrinking profits and bankruptcy for mini-merchants and mini-entrepreneurs, while on top of that a few huge monopolistic e-commerce platform companies have arisen and expanded rapidly.

JEL classification: O11, O33, O53, P21

By reconsidering the concept of normal degree of utilization in view of the fact that growth occurs through irregular fluctuations, the paper points out elements of weakness in the formalizations of the principles that underlie the notion of Harrodian instability. Since the latter was at the origin of the adoption of fully adjusted positions to represent long-term trends of the economy, such arguments call into question this way of addressing demand-led growth.

JEL Classification: O40, E12

This paper investigates the relation between relative prices and the income distribution by examining variations in output and prices occurred over thirty-three US business cycles from 1857 to 2009. Using a broad database, the author shows that average relative prices in twenty-seven industries of the US economy presented a remarkably smaller variation than the corresponding variation in output levels, profits and wages. These time-series results, although not conclusive, may provide additional empirical evidence of the Ricardian claim that even relative market prices in an industrial economy are strongly dominated by the correspondent integrated unit labor costs and that changes along a wage-profit schedule will play only a secondary role in their determination.

JEL classifications: E11, E32