Rent in Macro-economics
Another possible reason for the relative obscurity of the theory is that in modern macro-economic statistics and national accounts, no separate data is provided on the amounts of land rents and subsoil rents charged and earned, because they are not officially regarded as part of value-added, and consequently are not included in the calculation of GDP.
The underlying conceptual argument in national accounts is, simply put, that such rents do not reflect earnings generated by production and are unrelated to production, and consequently that such earnings do not make a net addition to the value of new output. Implicitly, therefore, many land rents are regarded as a transfer of income. Typically only the annual value of expenditure on land improvements and the value of leases of productive equipment are recorded as "productive", value-adding earnings.
In Marx's theory, however, land rents do not simply reflect a property income gained from the ownership of an asset, but are a real element of surplus value and consequently of the value product, insofar as those rents are a flow of earnings which must be paid out of the new value created by the current production of primary products on the land. Such rents are according to Marx, part of the total cost-structure of capitalist production, and a component of the value of agricultural output.
Read more about this topic: Differential And Absolute Ground Rent
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