Structural Inequality, Quasi-rents and the Democratic Peace

This article employs the neo-Ricardian concept of quasi-rents – temporary above-market returns – to vindicate the structuralist claim that patterns of international order are shaped by global inequality and the transnational division of labour. Developing a framework linking the distribution of quasi-rents within the global economy to the process of class formation, the article examines the implications for the influential ‘social market democracy’ explanation of the democratic peace. It argues that the democratic peace is in part predicated on the quasi-rents enjoyed by substantial sections of the workforces of the ‘core’ advanced industrial states. Such a political economy provides the foundations for a ‘social market democracy’ in which economic security can be enjoyed by substantial sections of the population, giving rise to the system of values on which the democratic peace rests. Thus, present patterns of international order result from a historically specific unequal distribution of quasi-rents within the world economy

Democracy · Development economics · Distribution (mathematics · Economic rent · Economic system · Economics · Inequality · Market economy · Neoclassical economics · Order (exchange · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Law · Political Economy and Marxism

• Disintegrative Tendencies in Global Political Economy

  Open Access•Barry K Gills, Kevin Gray et al.•Disintegrative Tendencies in…•2017

  Add to list