The GDP Illusion: Value Added versus Value Capture

The Entrepreneurial State by Mariana Mazzucato: A critical engagement

“…This is a particularly problematic argument since the US taxes corporate profits wherever they are generated. It confirms John Smith's (2012) criticism of the 'GDP illusion', that is, conventional national-income accounting according to which Apple's profit margins are counted as supposed value added generated within the United State. This argument sounds particularly implausible also in the light of the European Commission's charging Apple 13 billion Euros (plus interest) for allegedly avoiding taxes on profits generated throughout the EU but recorded in Ireland 3 .…”

Globalization and the growing defects of international economic statistics

“…Many economic stocks and transactions do not have obvious values, of the kind that we could readily read off a price tag attached to international merchandise trade. Even when such monetary values are available, we can legitimately ask whether they represent some inherent value of the good in question or an actor's ability to appropriate surplus (Smith, 2012). Either way, the growing defects of international economic data call for greater data skepticism and urges IPE researchers to strengthen the inferential foundations of quantitative analyses through routinized and careful examination of whether official statistics suit our analytical ends.…”

Global Commodity Chains and the New Imperialism

“…In effect, as numerous analysts have now shown, labor values generated by production are "captured" and not registered as arising in the peripheral countries due to asymmetries in power relations, in which multinational corporations are the key conduits. 85 Hidden in the pricing and international exchange processes of the global capitalist economy-a reality scarcely captured in traditional commodity-chain or even value-chain analysis-is an enormous gross markup on labor costs (rate of surplus value) amounting to superexploitation, both in the relative sense of above-average rates of exploitation and also, frequently, in the absolute sense of workers paid less than the cost of the reproduction of their labor power. The conditions of political-economic power in relation to the periphery of the world economy feed widening gross profit margins, leading to today's global overaccumulation.…”