Multilateral Merchandise Trade Imbalances and Uneven Economic Development

Contrary to orthodox international trade and national development theory, the uneven development of world capitalism was not accompanied by balanced trade (or growth) but rested in fact on a fundamental imbalance of international trade between the developing metropolis and the underdeveloping, colonialised, countries. Except for the years of worst depression in the metropolis, the latter had a constant but growing trade deficit and the underdeveloped countries a trade surplus during the classical imperialist period of world capitalist development at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The almost exclusive theoretical and empirical interest in the balance of payments, and obsession with the mechanisms that make it balance, has cast a ‘veil of money’ over the underlying merchandise imbalance of trade whose role, which we believe is fundamental in the process of uneven capitalist development and underdevelopment, has remained all but unperceived. (For this reason also the following discussion can be no more than the preliminary formulation of research hypotheses that demand empirical investigation and theoretical reformulation.)