Analytical Political Economy

9QUANTITATIVE EMPIRICAL RESEARCH IN MARXIST POLITICAL ECONOMY: A SELECTIVE REVIEW

Deepankar Basu

University of Massachusetts Amherst

1. Introduction

Marxist political economy has a long and distinguished tradition of quantitative empirical analysis, going all the way back to Marx himself. Using tax returns data to infer patterns of top income distribution and nutrition data to understand conditions of the working class population in Volume I of Capital, Marx anticipated Thomas Piketty by more than 150 years and the discipline of development economics by about 100. Lenin's monumental work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, had used extensive quantitative data on distribution of landholdings, small peasant industries and factory industries in Russia and Europe to argue against the Narodnik claim that capitalism could not develop in a backward country like Russia.

This robust tradition has been kept alive by the painstaking research of numerous Marxist scholars, who have used, over the years, improved statistical techniques and better measurement for quantitative empirical work. In this chapter, I review some of this literature, focusing specifically on quantitative empirical research in the following areas: (a) construction of Marxist national accounts, (b) analysis of classical theories of relative prices, (c) probabilistic political economy, (d) profitability analyses and (e) analysis of classical-Marxian growth, distribution and biased technical change. The choice of ...