This book revisits the debate over the new international division of labour (NIDL) that dominated discussions in international political economy and development studies until the early 1990s. It submits that a revised NIDL thesis can shed light on the specificities of capitalist development in various parts of the world today. Taken together, the contributions amount to a novel value-theoretical approach to understanding the NIDL. This rests upon the distinction between the global economic content that determines the constitution and dynamics of the NIDL and the evolving national political forms that mediate its development. More specifically, the authors argue that uneven development is an expression of the underlying essential unity of the production of relative surplus-value on a world scale. They substantiate and illustrate this argument through several international case studies, including Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Ireland, South Korea, Spain and Venezuela.

Greig Charnock is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. 

Guido Starosta is Professor in the History of Economic Thought at the National University of Quilmes and Researcher at the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), Argentina.

Introduction; Greig Charnock and Guido Starosta.- Part I. Capital and the International Division of Labour.- Chapter 1. The General Rate of Profit and its Realisation in the Differentiation of Industrial Capitals; Juan Iñigo Carrera.- Chapter 2. The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Classic International Division of Labour: Ground-Rent and 'Resource Rich' Countries; Gastón Caligaris.- Part II. Country Case Studies.- Chapter 4.'Post-Neoliberalism' in the International Division of Labour: The Divergent Cases of Ecuador and Venezuela; Thomas F. Purcell.- Chapter 5. The New International Division of Labour in 'High-Tech Production': The Genesis of Ireland's Boom in the 1990s; Tomás Friedenthal and Guido Starosta.- Chapter 6. The New International Division of Labour and the Differentiated Integration of Europe: The Case of Spain; Greig Charnock, Thomas F. Purcell and Ramon Ribera-Fumaz.- Part III. Sectoral Case Studies.- Chapter 7. Transnational Corporations and the 'Restructuring' of the Argentine Automotive Industry: Change or Continuity?; Alejandro Fitzsimons and Sebastián Guevara.- Chapter 8. Patterns of 'State-led Development' in Brazil and South Korea: The Steel Manufacturing Industries; Nicolas Grinberg.