Ground Rent and Capital Accumulation in Latin America, Uruguay between 1955 and 2019

One of the main concerns in
critical Latin American studies has been to understand the
particularities of its capital accumulation cycle. Among its main
exponents, a number of contemporary authors hold that the
determination of Latin American economies is the production of ground
rent bearing commodities. They propose that this source of surplus
value, ground rent, allows them to compensate their productivity lag
when compared with central economies. Based on this approach, this
paper studies capital accumulation in Uruguay between 1955 and 2015
with the hypothesis that agrarian ground rent oscillations determine
the forms adopted by capital accumulation. We present a brief
theoretical discussion, the methodology used to estimate ground rent,
and the first original estimate of agrarian ground rent during the
last 60 years. We distinguish between ground rent appropriated by
landowners and by other subjects non landowners due to the effect of
agrarian export taxes, overvaluation of the Uruguayan peso, the
cheapening of agricultural commodities for domestic consumption, and
the regulation of land lease prices and of agricultural commodities
prices for domestic consumption. Finally, we analyze the relative
magnitude of ground rent in the national mass of surplus value and
its incidence in capital accumulation.