Mr Dobb examines the history of economic thought in the light of the modern controversy over capital theory and, more particularly, the appearance of Sraffa's book The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, which was a watershed in the critical discussions constituted a crucial turning-point in the history of economics: an estimate not unconnected with his reinterpretation of nineteenth-century economic thought as consisting of two streams or traditions commonly confused under the generic title of 'the classical tradition' against which Jevons so strongly reacted.

This new volume explores two alternative economic theories - the classical theory and the marginalist or neoclassical theory- through a discussion between two eminent economists, Pierangelo Garegnani and Paul Samuelson. The key themes of the volume are the difference in approaches to the explanation of the distribution of income and relative prices, and therefore different approaches to all other economic problems, in particular capital accumulation and economic growth. The book discusses whether there is a 'classical' approach to the theory of value and distribution at the core of economic theory that is fundamentally different from the later marginalist or neoclassical theory. In the volume, the late Pierangelo Garegnani argues for the validity of Piero Sraffa's position on this issue, whilst the late noble laureate Paul Samuelson vehemently contests it. At a time of economic crisis, the future of the discipline is far from certain, and so it is extremely important to bring these debates back into the light, by reproducing them together for the first time. A comprehensive introduction by Heinz Kurz sets the debate in this context, and provides crucial background to the arguments.

This book looks at the value and distribution debates on the theories of Adam Smith. A variety of the aspects of his work are covered in this book such as his labour command measure, as are a number of interpretations and criticisms.

The book presents a rigorous reconstruction of Ricardo's contribution to economic theory and a unifying interpretation of the key issues of Ricardo's research. Part One deals primarily with the problems of value and distribution Part Two deals specifically with the issues of distribution and growth. * Contemporary economic literature in the fields of value, distribution and growth is witnessing a renewed interest in the approach of the classical school, notably in the work of David Ricardo.

This book presents an in-depth, novel, and mathematically rigorous treatment of the modern classical theory of value based on the spectral analysis of the price–profit–wage rate system. The classical theory is also subjected to empirical testing to show its logical consistency and explanatory content with respect to observed phenomena and key economic policy issues related to various multiplier processes. In this context, there is an examination of the trajectories of relative prices when the distributive variables change, both theoretically and empirically, using actual input–output data from a number of quite divers e economies. It is suggested that the actual economies do not behave like the parable of a one-commodity world of the traditional neoclassical theory, which theorizes the relative scarcities of “goods and production factors” as the fundamental determinants of relative prices and their movement. By contrast, the results of the empirical analysis are fully consistent with the modern classical theory, which makes the intersectoral structure of production and the way in which net output is distributed amongst its claimants the fundamental determinants of price magnitudes. At the same time, however, these results indicate that only a few vertically integrated industries (“industry core” or “hyper-basic industries”) are enough to shape the behaviour of the entire economy in the case of a disturbance. This fact is reduced to the skew distribution of the eigenvalues of the matrices of vertically integrated technical coefficients and reveals that, across countries and over time, the effective dimensions of actual economies are surprisingly low. Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE />

This book develops a unified treatment of the income distribution–capital–value problems with respect to actual economies, and then gradually turns to the issues of effective demand and capitalist accumulation fluctuations from both political economy and economic policy perspectives. That treatment, on the one hand, places produced means of production, positive profits, and capital accumulation at the centre of the analysis and, on the other hand, is analytically based on the modern control theory. Hence, the authors’ investigation is concerned with input–output representations of actual single and joint production, heterogeneous labour, and open economies; zeroes in on the characteristic value distributions of the system matrices; and, finally, derives meaningful theoretical results consistent with the empirical evidence, and vice versa. The main topics addressed are the uncontrollable/unobservable aspects of the real-world economies, the powerful low-order spectral approximations and reconstructions of the inter-industry structure of production–value–distributive variables relationships, the critical-constructive appraisal of both “mainstream” and “radical” theories of value, the matrix demand multipliers and demand-switching policies in heterogeneous capital worlds, and the circular inter-actions amongst income distribution, effective demand, accumulation, and technical conditions of production. Written on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the publication of both Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities and Rudolf E. Kalman’s paper “On the general theory of control systems”, this book provides a consistent and comprehensive framework for theoretical, empirical, and economic policy research.