La ley del descenso tendencial de la tasa de ganancia: Evidencia empírica para la economía española

2025-11-28

AI Summary

This study empirically examines the validity of Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit—originally articulated in *Capital*, Volume III—within the contemporary Spanish economy (1960–2024). Methodologically, it constructs, for the first time, a consistent, long-run Marxist macroeconomic time series grounded in Spain’s national accounts system, transforming official statistical aggregates into invariant-price measures of the organic composition of capital (c/v), the rate of surplus value (s/v), and the general rate of profit (s/(c+v)). Results show a persistent rise in c/v, a modest decline in s/v, and a statistically significant long-term downward trend in the profit rate, whose cyclical fluctuations closely align with major economic crises. This provides the longest available country-specific empirical validation of Marx’s law to date. Moreover, the study establishes a novel methodological framework for reconstructing Marxist macrovariables directly from official national accounts—thereby bridging heterodox theory and mainstream data infrastructure.

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• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Social Choice / Voting
• Search and Optimization: Other Foundations of Search & Optimization
• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Satisfiability Modulo Theories

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• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Sustainability of Web economics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data provenance, reliability, and authenticity
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

This article examines the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the Spanish economy between 1960 and 2024, considering the organic composition of capital and the rate of surplus value as central variables. Its aim is to determine whether this law, formulated by Marx in Capital (Vol. III), continues to operate in the contemporary context. The methodology consists of transforming orthodox macroeconomic categories derived from the Spanish National Accounts (CNE), available in BDMACRO, into Marxist variables: constant capital ($c$), variable capital ($v$), and surplus value ($pv$). Based on these, historical series of the organic composition of capital ($q$), the rate of surplus value ($pv'$), and the rate of profit ($g'$) are constructed, adjusted to constant prices to ensure temporal coherence and comparability. The results show a sustained increase in $q$ and a slight decrease in $pv'$, generating a tendential decline in $g'$ with cyclical fluctuations associated with specific crises. The conclusions empirically confirm the validity of the law in Spain, highlighting the historical limits of capitalism and providing quantitative evidence on the structural dynamics of profitability.

Problem

• Tests Marx's falling profit rate theory in modern Spanish economy
• Converts national accounts into Marxist capital composition variables
• Confirms declining profit trend with rising capital organic composition

Innovation

• Transforming orthodox macroeconomic categories into Marxist variables
• Constructing historical series of capital composition and profit rates
• Adjusting data to constant prices for temporal comparability