The Lewisian Model of Unequal Exchange
The catastrophic failure of the law of one price
The 2024 Nature Communications paper by Hickel, Hanbury Lemos, and Barbour presents a stark empirical finding: the contemporary world economy is organized around a massive, persistent net appropriation of labor from the Global South to the Global North through unequal exchange. The scale is staggering. In 2021, the South’s net transfer of embodied labor…
