Thesis (Ph. D.)--Dept. of Economics. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2007. / "A dissertation in economics and social science consortium." Advisor: James I. Sturgeon. Typescript. Vita. Title from "catalog record" of the print edition Description based on contents viewed July 30, 2008. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-217). Online version of the print edition.

This dissertation focuses on class in two senses of the term. First, it analyzes the conditions under which members of an economic class, a group defined by some common economic interest or position, may develop a collective identity, a consciousness of their common interests, and a capacity for collective action in furtherance of these interests. In particular, it is a case study of the U.S. capitalist class, especially the very largest non-financial companies (and their executives and directors), and its political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This aspect of the dissertation focuses on the formation of the Business Roundtable, the decisions of the largest U.S. industrial companies to join the Roundtable and its predecessor organizations, and the Roundtable's approach to recruiting new members. Second, the dissertation concerns class as a particular kind of social process, the division of the social product between workers and employers. In particular, it analyzes trends in the labor and capital shares of U.S. national income during the postwar period and especially during the 1960s business-cycle expansion. It explores the role of fluctuations of unemployment in the changing balance of power between labor and capital and in turn on their income shares, and the role of these changes in galvanizing the U.S. capitalist elite into concerted political action.

This dissertation postulates that as effect of the model of development adopted by Puerto Rican authorities since the late forties, Puerto Rico became a "Regional Armature" of U.S. intensive accumulation and monopolist regulation over the 1950-1980 period. The asymmetrical insertion of the island into U.S. intensive accumulation circuits, is documented through an account of the shares of local manufacturing assets, value added and employment represented by U.S. corporations, as well as by an approximation to the industrial linkages between Puerto Rico and the United States. The linkage with U.S. monopolist regulation is presented through the historical account of the gradual partial extension to the island of mainland regulation institutions such as; collective bargaining practices, welfare programs, the Federal Reserve, the consumer credit network and the oligopolistic structures in the final goods market. The asymmetry of the island's integration into U.S. accumulation and regulation networks is marked by the location of only certain phases of U.S. manufacturing activity, much higher unemployment levels, lower wages and less per capita federal aid in Puerto Rico as compared to other economic regions of the United States. It is argued that the island's participation in mainland mass production activities and Keynesian mainland macro-economic policies to stimulate aggregate demand during the 1950-1973 growth period, led to economies of scale in the production of consumer durables and to increases in real and social wages making possible the local adoption of mainland mass consumption patterns. It is also argued that these consumption patterns were partially maintained during the 1974-1989 crisis period through the direct income enhancement effect and the indirect credit enhancement effect of U.S. food stamps and the credit multiplier effect of corporate CD's in local banks. Stability tests for the intercept of the consumption function for durable goods were performed to back up the latter hypothesis. Finally, the generalization of low wage, low productive Neo-taylorist service jobs among small pockets of higher wage jobs in manufacturing and services, is presented as evidence of Puerto Rico's insertion into the new extensive accumulation patterns prevalent in the United States.

This dissertation explores how economic institutions governing finance and investment have contributed to growth in reform-era China. Economic and political reforms transformed Chinas prior centrally-planned economy. Although reforms incorporated elements of market institutions and private enterprise, state institutions exercising extensive authority over a wide range of economic affairs critically and fundamentally played a central role in transforming this economy from one of the worlds poorest to the worlds second largest in the span of one generation. I explain the emergence of a unique configuration of institutions supportive of industrial policy implemented by largely autonomous local government officials. In combination with state-directed bank credit, this local government industrial policy finance has played a significant and positive role in development of exports in China. Though private entrepreneurs are often seen as dynamic engines of growth in Chinas reform-era economy, I show the vast majority of entrepreneurs are low-skilled, low-productivity, and exhibit non-positive rates of capital accumulation. Most entrepreneurs would experience higher earnings were they not segmented into self-employment occupations by adverse socioeconomic conditions. Rather than engines of growth, Chinas entrepreneurs resemble more the vast numbers of informal sector self-employment prevalent in many developing countries.

In this dissertation I develop a Marxian class analysis of corn-producing family farms in the Midwestern United States during the early twentieth century. I theorize the family farm as a complex hybrid of mostly feudal and ancient class structures that has survived through a contradictory combination of strategies that includes the feudal exploitation of farm family members, the cannibalization of neighboring ancient farmers in a vicious hunt for superprofits, and the intervention of state welfare programs. The class-based definition of the family farm yields unique insights into three broad aspects of U.S. agricultural history. First, my analysis highlights the crucial, yet under-recognized role of farm women and children’s unpaid labor in subsidizing the family farm. Second I offer a new, class-based perspective on the roots of the twentieth century “miracle of productivity” in U.S. agriculture, the rise of the agribusiness giants that depended on the perpetual, technology-induced crisis of that agriculture, and the implications of government farm programs. Third, this dissertation demonstrates how the unique set of contradictions and circumstances facing family farmers during the early twentieth century, including class exploitation, were connected to concern for their ability to serve the needs of U.S. industrial capitalist development. The argument presented here highlights the significant costs associated with the intensification of exploitation in the transition to industrial agriculture in the U.S. The family farm is implicated in this social theft. Ironically, the same family farm is often held up as the bedrock of American life. Its exalted status as an example of democracy, independence, self-sufficiency, and morality is enabled among other things by the absence of class awareness in U.S. society. When viewed through the lens of class, the hallowed family farm becomes example of one of the most exploitative institutions in the U.S. economy. The myth of its superiority takes on a new significance as one of the important non-economic processes helping to overdetermine the family farm’s long survival, while participating in foreclosing truly radical transformations of these institutions to non-exploitative alternatives.

In view of the prevalence of information asymmetry and incentive incompatibility problems, the market for capital and the employment relationship are shown to be prey to pervasive agency problems that make economic transactions subject to enforcement costs. The presence of these costs subverts the Walrasian presumption of efficiency for decentralized markets, and the separation between efficiency and ownership concerns, resulting in forms of capital rationing and productive inefficiencies. Under these conditions, government intervention might help to attenuate the coordination failures and their associated efficiency losses for the economy by facilitating ownership of assets by those economic agents for whom information is relatively costless, and who have the capacity to take into account the consequences for all stakeholders. In this dissertation, we test the hypothesis that a union-controlled investment fund, such as the Fonds de solidarite des travailleurs du Quebec (FSTQ) might constitute an institutional innovation attenuating problems of information asymmetry and incentive incompatibilities. Through a case-study, we first analyze the original institutional features of the FSTQ that could help alleviate and/or compound the said agency problems. We then turn to an analysis of a segment of the FSTQ investment portfolio to verify whether these FSTQ-specific institutional features generate gains or losses for stakeholders, the economy and the government. On the basis of the evidence gathered, it is shown that the FSTQ effectively helps relieve problems of capital rationing; and fosters greater labor-management cooperation that results--under certain conditions--in measurable labor productivity gains, thus engendering a net social gain. In view of these gains and of the concentration of the FSTQ investments in the riskier end of the investment spectrum, it is argued that government support of the FSTQ in the form of tax expenditures is justified and engenders a net fiscal surplus.

Despite the voluminous literature on North-South macroeconomic interactions and the key role of terms of trade variations in growth transmission from one region to another, a significant research gap persists for two reasons. First, there has been very little empirical work on testing of the relationships between growth patterns and terms of trade movements. Second, the empirical studies dedicated to testing the Prebisch-Singer Thesis (PST) focused on testing the long-run tendency for the terms of trade of primary commodities to deteriorate and neglected the joint nature of the predictions arising out of a complete formulation of PST. This dissertation seeks to properly specify the PST, provide a generalization of it to the case of imbalanced trade, and extend it to a three-region framework through a structuralist North-South model. Multiple paths of growth divergence/convergence and terms of trade deterioration/improvement emerge depending on the structural changes influencing the income-elasticity differentials. I carry out two sets of empirical analyses. First, I use aggregate data on North-South terms of trade indices to test the presence and significance of a downward trend. Second, I use panel data analysis and rolling regressions to show the evolution of income-elasticity differentials. The results suggest that the growth rates of developing countries during the 1980s declined in both absolute and relative terms partly as a result of the downward trend in terms of trade and partly as a result of income elasticity differentials reflecting the productive and technological asymmetries between the developed and developing economies. However, these structural asymmetries have not remained constant: the results show that they changed both over time and over cross-sections of different groups of countries. In general the countries that diversified towards manufactured exports had better chances of eliminating the elasticity differentials, and thus attaining relatively higher rates of growth. The cross-country study is complemented by a comparative case study of Turkey and Malaysia. The results show that industrial and trade policies, if carefully designed and effectively implemented, can counter potential costs of external market dynamics while taking advantage of the opportunities for advancing dynamic comparative advantages.

What does socialism mean? This word carries many implications and in this thesis I consider how the concept of socialism was constructed within the discourses of classical Marxian economic and social theory. Socialism is understood to refer both to a general theory of historical and economic development as well as a particular post capitalist political economic system. One of the chief aims of this thesis is to examine the relationship between these two different levels of meaning of the word socialism. The classical Marxian discourse I analyze has three important levels or aspects which are combined in various ways to produce complex, though ultimately reductive, understandings of socialism. These are discourses of economic determinism, relative autonomy, and class analysis. How these modes of thought serve as the basis for policy, historical analysis and the construction of socialism as a political economic system is the principle topic of this thesis. I develop this thesis by examining three "moments" in the classical tradition: the work of the latter Engels, the period of the Second International, and Russian Marxism. Engels' work provides a basis for what follows as he subtly articulates the discourses of determinism, relative autonomy and class to produce a teleological vision of socialism. Later writers reproduce the tension created by the simultaneous use of the discourses of determinism and relative autonomy. The Second International, chiefly represented here by Karl Kautsky, use this classical conception to produce particular notions of socialist policy which I argue ultimately rely on a teleological notion of historical development. Later the Russian Marxists both extend and challenge the teleology and determinism of classical Marxian theory as they think about the nature of stages and the revolutionary transformation of societies. However, they frame what is innovative in their work within the boundaries bequeathed by Engels. In the final portion of this thesis I examine the consequences of the threads of the classical discourse on the construction of early "actually existing socialism" in the Soviet Union.

Between 1790 and 1865, the Jamaican political economy experienced a series of structural crises which precipitated changes in the relations of production on the island. Faced with changes within the global circulation of capital, groups of Jamaican elites, using their positions of privilege within the socio-economic hierarchy of the island, attempted to manipulate the socio-economic upheavals of the nineteenth century to maintain and reinforce their wealth, power, and status within Jamaican society. Within this context, large-scale coffee production, first using slave- and then later wage-based labor systems, was introduced to Jamaica for the first time. The introduction and development of this industry in one coffee producing region, the Yallahs drainage of the Blue Mountains in the southeastern quadrant of the island, are considered as manifestations of the global change that was affecting Jamaica at the time. A crucial component of the socio-economic manipulations of the nineteenth century was the introduction and negotiation of new social spaces. Two sequential phases of negotiation were experienced and have been interpreted: the introduction of coffee production under slavery, and the reorganization of labor/capital relations following emancipation. The intentions behind, and the often contested results of, the elites' attempts at restructuring the logic of accumulation during these phases of manipulation are interpreted by examining the historical, cartographic, and archaeological records. These various data sets are considered to be manifestations of three interrelated dimensions of space: the cognitive, the social and the material. By examining plantation space in this theoretical context, this dissertation interprets the way new spaces were designed and intended by elites to reinforce new social relations, and how such manipulations were resisted by the African-Jamaican majority in the Yallahs region.

I examine the impact of policies toward agricultural globalization on growth patterns, distribution patterns, commercialization, and the supply response of peasant farmers by analyzing agriculture in the Telangana region of South India between 1985 and 2000. I perform growth computations between 1970 and 2000 for agriculture in this region, track distributional changes based on the National Sample Survey (NSS) data between 1985 and 2000 using non-parametric regression techniques, and estimate an econometric model of supply response for Telangana farmers. This empirical investigation leads to two puzzles—one in the supply response arena and the other in the distributional arena. First, even as the prices of market-oriented crops have declined between 1991 and 2000 (during the phase of globalization), the planted area and the output of these crops have been rising rapidly. Second, between 1985 and 2000, the annual exponential growth rate of real agricultural output in the Telangana region of South India has been more than 4%, higher than much of the developing world during the same period, even as a majority of the farming population has undergone significant income/consumption losses, tragically manifested in the suicides of more than a thousand farmers. I explain these puzzles first by studying the historical antecedents (1925–1985) of agrarian change in the region, then through a theoretical peasant economy model with a lien constraint that is similar to the model that Ransom and Sutch employed in the context of the post-bellum US South, and finally by analyzing village-level institutional mechanisms based on field research (2000–01) in the region. The main conclusion of the dissertation is that the globalization-induced decline in the prices of non-food output in conjunction with local informal lending practices that require these very non-food crops as collateral help explain the tragic puzzles. The policy implications are also analyzed in the dissertation.