UMass Economist Deepankar Basu Garners 2022 Annual Best Paper Award

Deepankar Basu, professor of economics, has been honored with the 2022 Annual Best Paper Award by the Review of Radical Political Economics (RRPE), the journal of the Union for Radical Political Economics. In his paper, “A Reformulated Version of Marx’s Theory of Ground Rent Shows That There Cannot Be Any Absolute Rent,” Basu develops a theoretical model to analyze the concept of rent on non-produced resources such as land, which in Marxist political economy do not have any value.

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“Previous attempts to discuss Marx’s theory of ground rent have been marked by disagreements and confusions partly because of the difficulty in clearly defining the meaning of the terms involved in the discussion,” Basu notes. “In this article, I have offered a simple mathematical framework to conceptualize Marx’s ideas about ground rent.”

He concludes that under reasonable behavioral assumptions about landlords and capitalist farmers, there will be no absolute rent in a capitalist economy. The paper builds on Basu’s earlier research, including his 2018 analysis of Marx’s theory of ground rent.

The RRPE editorial board selects the best paper among all works published in the previous volume year of the journal. The Union for Radical Political Economics is an interdisciplinary association devoted to the study, development and application of radical political economic analysis to social problems.