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This paper proposes a systems framework for the analysis of economic exchange and development. Exchange is examined in the context of a social system in which actors have differential control over resources and different action opportunities and positions in a structure of social relationships. Exchange activities in a social system have ramifications in different spheres (economic and non‐economic) of social life. We focus on those ramifications which relate to social differentiation in terms of power‐unequal or differentiated action capabilities and different structural positions of actors in the social system of interaction. This perspective on exchange leads to the consideration of factors important to the emergence and maintenance of systemic, uneven development of action capabilities and to unequal dependency relationships among actors in a social system. In sum, what we wish to do in this paper is to develop a more systematic model that indicates the mechanisms whereby initial imbalances of the sort mentioned above generate social processes‐non‐economic as well as economic‐which tend to institutionalize the imbalances and perpetuate them in a self‐reinforcing manner.

This chapter aims to shed light on the hidden benefits and losses of US-China trade within the framework of unequal exchange theory. After presenting the evolutions of the trade balance between China and the United States, we propose two methods for measuring the unequal exchange between them: one considers the labor content directly incorporated into the exchange; the other focuses on the international values with input-output tables. This allows to present a synthesis of sectoral analyses. Our results show a significant unequal exchange in US-China trade over 1995–2014, the United States being actually the main beneficiary of this trade. Both methods exhibit the inequality in exchange tending to decrease over time; China's disadvantage has been gradually reducing from the 2000s. We finally suggest that the relative decline in the hegemonic status of the United States in this bilateral unequal relationship could help explain its decision to launch its trade war with China.

While classical exchange theorists excluded bargaining from the scope of their theories, most contemporary theorists have done the opposite, concentrating exclusively on negotiated exchanges with binding agreements. This chapter describes the theoretical logic and empirical results of a new program of research comparing the effects of reciprocal and negotiated forms of exchange. As the work shows, fundamental differences between the two forms of exchange affect many of the processes addressed by current theories. Reciprocal exchanges produce weaker power use, greater feelings of trust and affective commitment, and stronger perceptions of the partner’s fairness than equivalent negotiated exchanges. I discuss the implications of this work for theories of exchange and social interaction, and outline future directions for the next phase of the research program.

Under the circumstance that the development of developing countries is a major issue that has long been of concern to Marxist scholars, the research is focused on the category of development benefit, which Xi Jinping has mentioned many times.

Based on the Marxist theory of international value, the authors of this paper indicate that development benefit is the result of developing countries' consistently increasing labor productivity, reducing squandering in labor and transforming more labor into real value, and thus the fundamental cause of unequal development in international economics turns from the field of circulation to the area of production.

Also, the authors summarize China's experience of obtaining the development benefit and China's development path featuring common development and criticized the comparative advantage of mainstream Western economics, revealed the path of dependency development represented by mainstream Western economics.

Finally, the authors analyze the essence of the economy and trade conflict between China and the US and the respective strategic goals of the two countries and provide an outlook on the contest between the two roads of development and the evolutionary trend of the relationship between developed and developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to develop principles through which the global economic structure could become more equal and just; it begins by demonstrating that world poverty is pervasive, and that the global economic structure is very unequal.

The paper utilizes conceptual/theoretical arguments in welfare economics, utilitarianism, Sen's capability approach, and Rawlsian theories of justice to argue that none of those theories can lead to a more equal global economic structure. Thus, the development of more egalitarian principles is needed.

Arguing that the principles that Rawls developed in his 1999 The Law of Peoples are more egalitarian than the other theories, the paper still finds them less than adequate. However, the principles developed in the paper can lead the world toward a more just and much more egalitarian economic structure.

Since the principles developed in the paper are more egalitarian, helping toward ending world poverty and extreme inequality, the paper and its findings constitute an original and a valuable contribution.

The purpose of this study is to explain the opinions of the Muslim jurists available in the fiqh books so that they may be compared with the approaches adopted by modern scholars for defining the concept of riba. It is argued that the method of jurists was different from the one adopted by the modern Muslim jurists and Islamic economists. The new method dichotomizes riba into those of the Quran and Sunnah. On the contrary, jurists of four Sunni schools considered the Quran and Sunnah in this regard as a single whole, and they saw Sunnah as the elaboration of riba. By explaining the similarities shared by different fiqh schools, it is explained that there is no need for a definition of riba.

The paper uses the method of content analysis. The authors have consulted the authentic fiqh manuals of the four Sunni fiqh schools to substantiate the objectives.

One of the major findings of this paper is that interest charged in loan transactions, including bank loans, is riba according to the four Sunni fiqh schools. Moreover, the paper also shows that the similarities among the four Sunni fiqh schools are far more significant than the often-highlighted disagreements among them regarding the concept of riba. The methodology adopted by modern Muslim scholars seems to add confusions around the concept of riba.

The paper discusses views of only four Sunni fiqh jurists.

The paper explains the common methodology followed by the jurists for understanding riba, the significant similarities resulting from their common method, the link between the concept of riba and different types of financial transactions within the framework of the jurists and that combining several fiqh schools at a time is a contradiction-ridden methodology.

With asymmetric investments in exchange (i.e. sourcing) relationships, both sourcing firms and suppliers invest but one party invests more than the other. This paper aims to examine the associations between asymmetric (i.e. unequal) investments in exchange relationships and the tendency of the strategic supplier base to shirk as perceived by the sourcing firm, as well as the moderation effects of cross-functional information sharing within a sourcing firm on these associations.

The authors analyzed survey data from 500 US middle-market manufacturers via ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation. Besides appropriate controls, the authors also employed the heteroskedasticity-based instrumental variable approach to ensure that analytical inferences are not influenced by endogeneity.

On average, when a sourcing firm invests more than its strategic supplier base into their exchange relationships, the perceived tendency of the strategic supplier base to shirk decreases. This negative association is more pronounced when a sourcing firm facilitates cross-functional information sharing. Conversely, when the strategic supplier base invests more than the sourcing firm into their exchange relationships, the perceived tendency of the strategic supply base to shirk is not detected unless the sourcing firm facilitates cross-functional information sharing.

Prior research reveals that investments by a sourcing firm or by suppliers influence supplier shirking. This paper provides new evidence as to how and why asymmetric investments in exchange relationships relate to the perceived tendency of the strategic supplier base to shirk and new evidence as to how and why cross-functional information sharing safeguards against this tendency when investments in exchange relationships are unequal.

This conceptual paper examines and evaluates patronage and clientage as a system of interrelated dyadic exchanges between unequals through which goods and services circulate, flowing both up and down through stratified societies. The parties involved may be in different places socially and geographically.

Data are presented for Brazil from the period of the Old Republic beginning in the 1890s, through the end of the Military Dictatorship in mid-1980s, and finally to the present, ending with today’s conditional cash transfer programs. The data are examined against the background of a 15th century book, O Livro da Virtuosa Bemfeituria (The Book of the Virtuous Benefits), written by a Portuguese Prince influential in the expansion and discoveries as a guide for princes and great lords that is used in the paper very much in the way that Adam Smith’s writings are used for most economic behavior today.

There are striking parallels over this long historical period in the behaviors referred to as patronage and clientage that may be conceptualized as an older (traditional) way of ordering the flow of goods and services (distributing them), alternative and parallel to market mechanisms that have, and continue to operate in Brazilian society.

Patronage and clientage are often-misunderstood behaviors, sometimes referred to as corrupt, that alternatively may be explained and understood as part of a still viable and operational socio-cultural system that goes back to a period before the colonization of Brazil.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a critical, historical, and legal account and analysis of how money, an inexorable lubricant of all economies, evolved from metallic origins to acceptance in paper form in Muslim traditions.

This paper underlines flaws, points of objections, corollaries and counter-points, and it ends with a thematic discussion on the way forward for Muslim nations with respect to various political and regulatory implications for implementations of potential paper money alternatives

After undergoing experimentation and customary use of various objects as money (such as sea shells, gold, silver, stones, tobacco, etc.), the world has finally settled down by embracing paper money as an official medium of exchange.

Paper money also endured many financial crises and initial oppositions to its premise. From an Islamic standpoint, paper money poses certain flaws and limitations that can make it unacceptable from legal perspectives.