ABSTRACT
In recent decades, capitalist globalization has entailed a new international division of labour with the relocation of some stages of manufacturing production from the Centre to the Periphery through global value chains (GVCs). This new pattern of global production and trade is marked by wide income disparities between different regions of the world economy. This chapter presents the empirical measurement of value transfers in traditional and GVC trade on a global level over the last 30 years (1990–2019), based on an aggregate version in value added of the model of unequal exchange presented in the Chapter 5. Unequal exchange is a phenomenon of absolute importance, contributing significantly to the reproduction of economic and social development gap between the Centre and the Peripheries of the global economy. It is characterized by a small group of developed countries that capture a higher value than the value domestically produced to the detriment of a larger group of less developed countries, which transfer a considerable part of the produced value abroad. Within each of the two groups, beneficiaries and donors, the situation is differentiated both spatially and temporally. Particularly significant is the distinction between an Emerging Periphery, characterized by a slow but steady improvement of its international exchange relations, and a vast Poor Periphery, which, on the contrary, has steadily worsened the ability to capture and maintain the value produced within the domestic economy.
