>Max Sawicky wrote:
>
>>Seems to me Doug's question is what is the
>>effect of the extra X on the growth rate.
>
>No, I'm not that vulgar, claims to the contrary. I was looking for
>some kind of qualitative and quantitative account of the
>contribution of imperialism to the maintenance of First World
>wealth. Is it something that's constantly renewed every day, or is
>it mainly the inheritance from an earlier colonialism? I got flamed
>for saying this once, but the poorest countries in the world are
>poor mainly because they're excluded from value production, not
>because they get the short end of it. What do the 1.2 billion people
>who live on $1/day contribute to our $25,000 per capita DPIs?
>
>Doug
Arthur Lewis would say that a century ago the potential competition
in the labor market from the people who lived on $1 a day kept wages
in the tea plantations of Ceylon, the rubber plantations of Malaya,
and the coffee-growing regions of Java and Brazil low, and so kept
the prices of "tropical" consumption goods imported into the first
world low as well.
But World War I brought an end to the era of free and open migration
within the periphery. So it's very hard to figure out any impact
today.
Go back further in time and you get big proportional numbers. Britain
spent about 2% of GDP importing cotton from the U.S. in the first
half of the nineteenth century. Getting the same cotton from India or
from Egypt would have cost perhaps three times as much--so 4% of
British GDP in 1840 can be thought of as surplus value extracted from
American slaves. Of course, almost all of that surplus was then
distributed to the consumers of British machine-spun and -woven
textiles--British workers, Dutch peasants, Indian merchants, and so
on. Figuring out the true incidence is very hard...
Brad DeLong
