This article examines the global clean energy transition through the lenses of world systems theory and historical materialism, situating contemporary energy system shifts within broader histories of economic struggle and geopolitical contestation. Extending existing frameworks of energy transitions as products of economic conflict, it traces how energy security concerns produced divergent responses among oil importers, embodied by US market-led shale extraction versus China’s state coordinated renewable dominance. While the US approach continues to facilitate imperial decline, China’s renewables strategy has catalyzed its rise as a global power while simultaneously enabling the resurgence of resource nationalism and the developmental state across the Global South. The renewable transition thus emerges not as a technical shift but as a geopolitical rupture signifying radical economic transformation at the global scale. JEL Classification : Q40, P16, F59, Q54

Mainstream economics is ill equipped to deal with systemic issues such as the climate crisis. Yet there is no shortage of approaches that extend neoclassical principles to nature-economy relations, and they hold considerable currency in policy discourses. This article interrogates neoclassical thought on climate change from the perspective of economics imperialism, the expansion of economic analysis onto new subject matter at the expense of other approaches. Drawing on the work of William Nordhaus and Nicholas Stern, I argue that climate change economics has been underpinned by economics imperialism in its second “market imperfection” and third “suspension” phases. Economics imperialism has thus contributed to excluding considerations of power, race, class, gender, and other systemic inequalities from the field, and underpins solutions that delay radical climate action. JEL Classification: B41, B50, Q50, Q54

This study applies multiple measures of profit rate, including those based on the Marxian concept of productive labor, to different data sources to control for data and definition impacts. Using a sample of thirty-two countries, the study finds a downward trend in the world rate of profit between 1952 and 2019, driven by technological change. A rising rate of surplus value acted as a countertendency and supported a partial recovery in the 1980s–1990s. The falling tendency has been common among most developed and developing countries. The falling profitability, together with declining productive and total worked hours and rising share of depreciation in the global value added, point to slower growth ahead. JEL Classification: P1, B24, B51

This article estimates the rate of surplus value of the Portuguese economy between 1995 and 2022 based on Marx’s labor theory of value. Drawing on national accounts and input-output tables, we calculate the monetary expression of labor time (MELT) and trace its evolution alongside working hours, real wages, and productivity. Our findings reveal a rising rate of exploitation, particularly during the post-2008 austerity period, and highlight the growing appropriation of income by capital. The results demonstrate the empirical relevance of Marxist value theory for understanding long-term class dynamics in a peripheral European economy. JEL Classification: B51, E25, C67

Heterodox debates already accept that market-centric “green” fixes are limited; what is missing is a mechanism-level account of how they misrecognize regulatory informality and autonomous communitarian societies. This article makes three contributions. First, it offers a typology separating regulatory informality from communitarian societies, showing why formalization-centric governance criminalizes the former and encloses or bypasses the latter. Second, it synthesizes four heterodox traditions, Original Institutional Economics, Feminist Political Economy, post-Keynesian macro, and Ecological Economics, into a comparative table that specifies pathways from informal/communitarian practices to environmental outcomes and predicts where price-centric tools will fail. Third, it applies these mechanisms to three emblematic cases, Delhi’s methane-to-energy waste project, Ecuador’s Yasuní “leave-oil-in-the-ground” effort, and community forestry in southern Mexico, demonstrating capital bias, enclosure, and the systematic undervaluation of reproductive and commons labor. The article advances a policy agenda that (a) builds value-articulating institutions, (b) recognizes/remunerates care and commons work, (c) channels adaptation finance to community-governed enterprises, and (d) aligns Northern degrowth with Southern sufficiency. Rather than treating “informality” as deficit, we reconceptualize informal economies and communitarian societies as sites of ecological reproduction, autonomy, and justice. JEL Classification : B52, B59, P16, Q57, Q01

The Indian economy has grown at a rapid pace, but over the past decade or so, corporate investments have faltered. Given the scale of what has been unfolding, a large literature has emerged on the investment slowdown. But even as a wide variety of explanations has emerged, within these debates there has been a conspicuous silence on the role played by corporate power in driving the investment trends. It is in this overall context that this article draws on the monopoly-stagnationist perspective associated with Baran and Sweezy to investigate the intricate linkages between corporate power and investment dynamics in twenty-first-century India. The analysis reveals that even as corporate power has expanded over the last two and a half decades, the rising tides of corporate concentration have gone hand in hand with a growing reticence on the part of capitalists to invest their profits in physical capital. The analysis therefore points to the need to bring corporate power back into the discussions on the investment slowdown. JEL Classification : B5, O1, P0

I study the effect of viable technical change on the equilibrium profit rate in Classical-Marxian models of economic growth with alternative labor market closures. Capitalists adopt a new technique of production only if it is expected to increase the profit rate at the existing real wage rate. I consider three alternative closures: (a) constant real wage rate (labor surplus economy), (b) constant wage share (advanced capitalist economy with strong labor), and (c) constant unemployment rate (advanced capitalist economy with weak labor). I show that the equilibrium profit rate can unambiguously fall after viable capital-using, labor-saving (CU-LS) technical for an advanced economy with strong labor. JEL Classification : B51, C02