Rent and Surplus Value in the Data Economy

The familiar claim that "data is the new oil'' obscures a central theoretical question in the political economy of digital capitalism: what kind of economic object is data, how does it enter the production process, and through which institutional mechanisms is its value appropriated? The paper presented in this ZEW Research Seminar develops a formal classical political economy model in which data has two analytically distinct roles. First, data is an accumulated capital stock that can reorganise production, alter the organic composition of capital, and mediate the labour process. Second, data is an excludable rent-bearing asset: dominant platforms can appropriate value from users, workers, and data-dependent firms through control over non-rival but institutionally enclosed informational infrastructures. The authors formalise this second role by adapting the distinction between differential and absolute ground rent to informational assets. Applying the framework to EUKLEMS-Intan data for 25 countries and 55 NACE sectors over 1995 - 2020, they find that data capital and exploitation are strongly sectoral and persistent. In their empirical setting, data intensity raises the organic composition of capital (capital deepening), decreases the rate of profits, and rejects the exploitation hypothesis. The model yields three policy-relevant results and one dynamic accumulation result. Data sharing can preserve the productive use of non-rival data while reducing monopoly rents. Privacy protection and data sharing are partial substitutes in their effect on platform rents, but only sharing directly weakens the institutional basis of enclosure. Observed surplus predicts growth in variable capital, data capital, and constant capital. Effective data governance should therefore combine privacy protection with interoperability, portability, and shared-access institutions rather than treating privacy and productivity as the central policy trade-off.