CHAPTER 7
Economic Rent: Obstacle to Development
or Fuel for Long-Term Growth
Hartmut Elsenhans
The North American rent-seeking school considers rents to be an obstacle
to development (Krueger 1974: 290–303; Olson 1982). The critics of
imperialism and underdevelopment have based their interpretation of
underdevelopment on exploitation, hence finally on a reduction of rents.
It is surprising that both schools have never entered into any mean-
ingful dialogue. Indeed, both aspects are intimately intertwined as rent
is a source of finance for investment which can allow catch-up indus-
trialization through stepping up the share of investment in total income.
But, unlike most mainstream marxist and non-marxist theories of growth,
Keynesian views would be based on the Bortkiewicz demonstration that
a tendency toward falling rates of profit is impossible (von Bortkiewicz
Article to be presented to Studies in Political Economy, written in 1995 and
ultimately rejected as too dense Unpublished paper.
H. Elsenhans (B )
University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany
e-mail: helsen@rz.uni-leipzig.de
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
H. Warnecke-Berger (ed.), Development, Capitalism, and Rent,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62605-1_7
175