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Following Marx's general law of capitalist accumulation, the present article seeks to evaluate the impact of fixed capital stock, labor productivity, and the mass of profits on the dynamics of employment in Colombia from 1965 to 2019 using a Vector Error Correction Model. The results show that the level of employment exhibits a significant long-term relationship with both the fixed capital stock and labor productivity. In line with Marx's theory, employment expands with fixed capital stock and contracts with labor productivity. In turn, the mass of profits has positive effects on both the capital stock and labor productivity. The empirical findings also support the existence of Marx's biased technical change as well as a negative feedback effect from employment to profits. JEL Classification: J21, C21, C22, B51 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Marx's economic theory, the level of employment is fundamentally determined by capital accumulation. Nevertheless, that determination is contradictory since, on the one hand, the employment level expands with the capital stock while, on the other hand, it tends to contract with technical change and the growing productivity of labour. This article seeks to estimate this contradictory effect employing two complementary econometric methods: first, cross-sectional regression analysis for more than 100 countries in the years 2014, 2004, 1994 and 1984; second, time-series analysis for the United States, France, Japan, Turkey and Mexico from 1964 to 2014. Our empirical results are in line with Marx's theoretical framework: the level of employment grows with the expansion of fixed capital stock and reduces with increases in the productivity of labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, there has been a growing literature dealing with the empirical estimation of the rate of profit and other Marxian variables in several countries. Nonetheless, there has been a paucity of econometric research about the impact of those Marxian variables on the growth rate in developing countries. This article seeks to evaluate the rate of profit and the rate of accumulation as determinants of the growth rate in Colombia during 1967–2019, using a generalized vector autoregressive model. We find that both variables are statistically significant and, in concordance with Marxian theory predictions, affect positively the growth rate. We also identify direct impacts of the growth rate over the profit rate and the accumulation rate as well as an economic relevant relationship between these latter variables. JEL Classification : B51, C22, O54 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]