Non-Equivalent Exchange: Enforced Inequalities, and the Fracturing of Community in the World Economy

Desires for community and belonging in the world system are commendable and widespread. But they will remain just that – desires – unless we confront the structural inequalities that make constructing meaningful global communities extremely difficult. That there are such inequalities in the global workplace is transparently clear. What is much less transparent are the mechanisms that systemically work to construct these inequalities – concretely shaped by states' positions within the world economy. This paper will argue that those positions are socially constructed and can be measured. The paper will begin by reviewing and revising contemporary approaches to mapping the hierarchical nature of the world economy. It will then outline and demonstrate the mechanisms of non-equivalent exchange, enforced by structured inequalities in the relative value of national currencies, which constantly create and reinforce this hierarchy.
The theoretical framing of non-equivalent exchange as a mechanism for surplus transfer within the world system was first mooted by Evgenii Preobrazhenskii in his pathbreaking 1926 book, The New Economics. Shortly after that, Preobrazhenskii, like so many others, would be caught up in the web of Stalin’s Great Terror, and he was never again in a position to pursue his 1926 insights. The concept was, however, picked up by others. Importantly, Ranjit Sau developed a concrete methodology for measuring this non-equivalent exchange, and the paper will develop and deploy a revised and expanded version of Sau’s methodology, using contemporary data sources.