Value Theory and Business Cycles was originally published in 1933 during the great depression. It is the purpose of the present study to show the vital relation between business cycle theory and value theory. In fact, the study is intended to contribute quite as definitely to the economics of value as of business cycles. Section I deals with embodied value theory and price movements. Section II deals with business cycles in relation to the marginal utility theory of value, as developed by the Austrian School. Section III deals directly with the problem of business equilibration, showing how certain forces contribute to instability, and suggesting ways and means of the achievement of greater business stability. The positive argument in this work may follow quite successfully by reading the first chapter in Section I and then proceeding directly to Sections II and III. -This book covers such topics as: -Why production does not finance consumption -Why supply does not beget demand -Why prices do not gravitate to the equilibrium point that clears the market -How a partial depression generates a general depression -Why the repeal of the antitrust laws and the promotion of unrestricted monopoly will not necessarily make business more stable-What the dangers of "greenbackism" really are-How the gold standard is unstable -Why liquidation fails to liquidate in time of depression.

This title was first published in 2003. Economists have had increasing success in arguing the merits of market-based approaches to environmental problems. By making polluting expensive, market-based approaches provide polluters with incentives to clean up, rather than mandates to stop polluting. These approaches include pollution taxes, transferable emissions permits and subsidies for pollution abatement. The purpose of this volume is to explore the situations where Command and Control (CAC) may not be all bad, and in fact might even have some advantages over market-based instruments (MBI).

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.