Appendix: Ground Rent and Capital Accumulation in Latin America, Uruguay between 1955 and 2015

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.

批判拉丁美洲研究（Critical Latin American Studies）的核心议题之一，是厘清其资本积累循环的特殊性。在该领域的主要代表学者中，诸多当代研究者认为，拉美经济体的核心属性是生产承载地租（ground rent）的商品。他们提出，这一剩余价值来源——地租，可用于弥补其与中心经济体相比存在的生产率滞后。基于这一研究路径，本文以1955年至2015年的乌拉圭为研究对象，提出假说：农业地租（agrarian ground rent）的波动决定了资本积累的具体形态。本文首先开展简要的理论探讨，阐述用于估算地租的研究方法，并给出近60年来农业地租的首次原创性估算结果。鉴于农业出口税、乌拉圭比索（Uruguayan peso）汇率高估、国内消费用农产品降价，以及土地租赁价格与国内消费农产品价格管制等因素的影响，本文区分了土地所有者与非土地所有者各自占有的地租。最后，本文分析了地租在全国总剩余价值中的相对规模，及其对资本积累的作用效应。