World class shares

Labour and profit share of value added, computed from the Penn World Table for any country set. A country's own share is exactly PWT's labour-share series (labsh) — this page's real subject is what happens to the group figure when countries are combined differently. The same weighting dispute that applies to the world rate of profit applies here.

labour_share = v / (s + v)  ·  profit_share = s / (s + v)  ·  s = Y(1 − labsh)  ·  v = Y · labsh

In plain terms: take a country's total output in a year (Y). Split it into what goes to wages (v, "variable capital" in Marx's terms) and what's left as profit (s, "surplus"). Labour share is the wages slice; profit share is the profit slice — they always add up to the whole. labsh is simply PWT's own published wage-share number for a country; this page uses it, doesn't recompute it. The only real question the controls below let you ask is: once you have every country's own wages-vs-profit split, how do you combine them into one number for the group you picked? That choice — not the underlying data — is what moves the group figure.

Static snapshot — this page shows one pre-computed result (G20, aggregate, 1950–2023). The controls below are for reference; changing them won't recompute anything on this deployment, which has no live backend. The full interactive version, with any country set or date range, runs locally from the marxist-ai project.

Country set
Method

In plain terms: how do you turn 19 countries' own wage/profit splits into one number? Sum then divide adds up all the wages and all the profits across the group first — big economies like the US or China end up dominating the answer. The three mean options instead average each country's own share, just weighted differently: by how much capital it has, by the size of its GDP, or (unweighted) treated exactly the same as every other country regardless of size. Luxembourg and China get one vote each either way.

These do not agree with each other, and the size of the gap is the point — it's how much the weighting choice, not the underlying data, is doing the work.

PPP (purchasing power parity) converts every country's prices onto a common scale, so a dollar of Chinese output is treated as buying roughly what a dollar buys in the US — needed to compare countries against each other. National prices stays in each country's own currency and price level over time — better for tracking one country's own trend, meaningless for comparing countries to each other.

Data & period

Golden age / profitability crisis / neoliberal recovery / since 1997 — Roberts's periodisation, not a finding. Change or clear these years and the table below follows.

Set the controls and choose Run calculation.