This book looks at the distribution of income and wealth and the effects that this has on the macroeconomy, and vice versa. Is a more equal distribution of income beneficial or harmful for macroeconomic growth, and how does the distribution of wealth evolve in a market economy? Taking stock of results and methods developed in the context of the 1990s revival of growth theory, the authors focus on capital accumulation and long-run growth. They show how rigorous, optimization-based technical tools can be applied, beyond the representative-agent framework of analysis, to account for realistic market imperfections and for political-economic interactions. The treatment is thorough, yet accessible to students and nonspecialist economists, and it offers specialist readers a wide-ranging and innovative treatment of an increasingly important research field. The book follows a single analytical thread through a series of different growth models, allowing readers to appreciate their structure and crucial assumptions. This is particularly useful at a time when the literature on income distribution and growth has developed quickly and in several different directions, becoming difficult to overview.

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 />

Textbook presenting an introduction to economic theories of income distribution evolved since the 1930s - surveys neoclassical equilibrium theory, and discusses neo-ricardian supply and demand and robinson's and pasinetti's theories. Bibliography pp. 187 to 193 and graphs.

This volume provides a general framework for a macroeconomic theory of income distribution and wealth distribution and accumulation. The book is divided into two parts. In the first the author surveys the sets of literature on the subject and relates them to each other. In the second part he makes his own contribution by presenting a new model which uses both neo-classical and post-Keynesian analytical tools. The author focuses on the laws which regulate the behavior of individuals and social groups within a given institutional set-up, and in particular those which regulate the accumulation of inter-generational wealth and life-cycle savings of families or dynasties, both in a deterministic and stochastic context. The theoretical issue of savings accumulation is reconsidered, alongside income distribution, and profit determination by concentrating on the historical reasons that are at the basis of "class distinction," as well as "generation distinction," in modern economic analysis.

This book brings together the work of scholars who have written for it independent essays in their areas of particular expertise in the general field of income distribution. The first eight chapters provide a review of the major theories of income distribution, while the final two are con cerned with problems of empirical estimates and inferences. One of these chapters presents estimates of factor shares in national income in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, while the other ex amines how relationships between the size distribution of income and economic development are being investigated. A convenient way of conveying an understanding of how economic theorists have dealt with the distribution of income is to examine separ ately each major approach to this subject. Each contributor was thus assigned a particular approach, or a major theorist. No attempt was made to avoid the apparent duplication that occurs when the same references are examined by different contributors. The reader gains by seeing how the same material can be treated by those looking at it from different perspectives. A chapter each has been devoted to Marx and Marshall.