ABSTRACT
The sharing of costs and benefits of international trade between countries is a long-standing issue. This chapter presents a critical review of the main approaches to unequal exchange, starting from the debate on free trade between the mercantilist school and the founders of classical political economy. In recent times, the thesis of unequal exchange has been proposed by neo-mercantilist, structuralist, and Marxist economic theories. These approaches can be divided into two main categories related to the ultimate cause of unequal exchange, as resulting from differences between countries in the structure of industrial specialization or in the remuneration of capital and labour. However, the different sources and forms of unequal exchange highlighted in the literature are lacking a unified theoretical framework. As a consequence, unequal exchange appears more as an exception to a normal balanced trade, rather than the ordinary rule of a globalized capitalist world economy.
