Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Basic theoretical foundations
- 3 Marxian categories and national accounts: Money value flows
- 4 Marxian categories and national accounts: Labor value calculations
- 5 Empirical estimates of Marxian categories
- 6 A critical analysis of previous empirical studies
- 7 Summary and conclusions
- Appendices
- A Methodology of the input–output database
- B Operations on the real estate and finance sectors
- C Summary input–output tables
- D Interpolation of key input–output variables
- E Annual estimates of primary variables
- F Productive and unproductive labor
- G Wages and variable capital
- H Surplus value and profit
- I Rates of exploitation of productive and unproductive workers
- J Measures of productivity
- K Government absorption of surplus value
- L Aglietta's index of the rate of surplus value
- M Mage and NIPA measures of the capitalist sector gross product
- N The net transfer between workers and the state, and its impact on the rate of surplus value
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
G - Wages and variable capital
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Basic theoretical foundations
- 3 Marxian categories and national accounts: Money value flows
- 4 Marxian categories and national accounts: Labor value calculations
- 5 Empirical estimates of Marxian categories
- 6 A critical analysis of previous empirical studies
- 7 Summary and conclusions
- Appendices
- A Methodology of the input–output database
- B Operations on the real estate and finance sectors
- C Summary input–output tables
- D Interpolation of key input–output variables
- E Annual estimates of primary variables
- F Productive and unproductive labor
- G Wages and variable capital
- H Surplus value and profit
- I Rates of exploitation of productive and unproductive workers
- J Measures of productivity
- K Government absorption of surplus value
- L Aglietta's index of the rate of surplus value
- M Mage and NIPA measures of the capitalist sector gross product
- N The net transfer between workers and the state, and its impact on the rate of surplus value
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Our primary database for wages comes from NIPA. We use employee compensation (EC) because it includes wages and salaries of employees as well as employer contributions to social security. This is the appropriate base for estimates of variable capital, since it represents the total cost of labor power to the capitalist.
A combination of BLS and NIPA data is used to estimate the wage per production worker. This is then applied to the estimate of the number of productive workers from Appendix F to derive the total wage bill of productive labor (variable capital). The wage bill of unproductive workers is derived as the difference between total NIPA wages and total variable capital. The basic steps involved will now be outlined.
Starting with the NIPA measure of employee compensation EC, we make two adjustments. First, because EC covers only employees whereas our measure of total employment L includes both employees and self-employed persons, we need to make some estimate of the wage equivalent of self-employed persons. Second, we must split the resulting measure of total wages into wages of productive and unproductive workers.
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- Measuring the Wealth of NationsThe Political Economy of National Accounts, pp. 304 - 322Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994