Analyzing historical and regional patterns of technical change from a classical-Marxian perspective

This paper analyzes whether technical change follows the labor-saving, capital-Using Marx-biased pattern. This form of technical innovation underlies Marx's explanation of the falling rate of profit. Long-term data for industrialized societies reveal such pattern punctuated by a phase in which both inputs present an increase in productivity. Regional data from the Penn World Table supplemented by our standardized net capital stock estimate reveals that most of the world regions have followed the Marx-biased technical change over the period 1964-1990. However, the non-Marx-biased pattern appears in some world regions in the 1980s. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.