This paper is the first to decompose absolute global income inequality into its within-country class and between country-location components. The estimates show that until 1970 locational income differences were the main driver of absolute global inequality, whereas its recent growth can be...

While recognising that most pre-capitalist formations exhibited elements of commodity exchange, Marx argued that capitalism differentiates itself as a genuine commodity system by virtue of two interdependent processes having reached a critical stage of development: a `stretching` of commodity...