the development of a market for sustainable coffee in the netherlands rethinking the contribution of fair trade in recent years researchers have observed the process of mainstreaming fair trade and the emergence of alternative sustainability standards in the coffee industry the underlying market dynamics that have contributed to these developments are however under researched insight into these dynamics is important to understand how markets can develop to favor sustainability this study examines the major developments in the market for certified coffee in the netherlands it finds that in the creation of a market for sustainable coffee decisions that significantly influence market creation are made in the lead companies retailers and coffee roasters these decisions are made possible by the availability of multiple systems of sustainability standards and by the existence of a small segment of loyal fair trade customers that ensured that sustainability remained an issue on the coffee market in the years before the market creation took off fair trade did not become the new rule in this process but it became the benchmark against which companies could compare themselves and the basis upon which they built in adopting or developing new standards that would be more feasible in their business models

the inverted pyramid a neo ricardian view on the economy environment relationship abstract in ecological economics natural resources which may contribute only a small amount to gdp are viewed as fundamental to the functioning of the economy they are sometimes pictured as sitting at the base of an inverted pyramid with the rest of the economy balanced on top of them in this paper we show that when prices are set by markup a standard heterodox assumption then the inverted pyramid picture of the economy emerges naturally in a neo ricardian model we demonstrate the use of the model with brief applications to biophysical economics the paper is one of a growing number that use heterodox macroeconomics to address questions in ecological economics

the dominant technique in joint production systems there was very little discussion of sraffa s theory of joint production during the first ten years after the publication of production of commodities by means of commodities sraffa 1960 because attempts to understand his theory of single product systems and the critique of the dominant theory of capital absorbed all attention thereafter the theory of joint production came increasingly into focus one reason little understood at first was that for the first time sraffa s approach provided economists working in the classical tradition with the possibility of defining prices of production in the presence of multiple product industries when i wrote my mr sraffa on joint production in 1970 luigi pasinetti drew my attention to the famous passage in jevons 1871 1957 in which he invokes joint production to prove that a classical cost of production theory as he understood it could not explain the relative prices of by products a little later sraffa s solution to the explanation of relative prices was used by steedman to criticise marx s form of the labour theory of value steedman 1975

labor productivity and the law of decreasing labor content this paper analyzes labor productivity and the law of decreasing labor content ldlc originally formulated by farjoun and machover 1983 first it is shown that the standard measures of labor productivity may be rather misleading owing to their emphasis on monetary aggregates instead the conventional classical marxian labor values provide the theoretically and empirically sound measures of labor productivity the notion of labor content and the ldlc are therefore central in order to understand the dynamics of capitalist economies second some rigorous theoretical relations between different forms of proflt driven technical change and productivity are derived in a general input output framework with flxed capital which provide deterministic foundations to the ldlc third the main theoretical propositions are analyzed empirically based on a new dataset of the german economy

the so called transformation problem revisited a brief comment this comment deals with lipietz s presentation of a solution which had been proposed to the transformation problem lipietz s account can be criticized in two respects first his attempt to integrate the familiar morishima type approach with the newer one is based on a confusion between the conceptual and factual determination of the value of labor power second his demonstration of the mathematical conditions for the validity of the new interpretation rests on an inappropriate conceptualization of the price and quantity mechanisms associated with capitalist competition moreover his results could not be applied to a more general framework which took account for example of joint production

the mercantile form of value and its place in marx s theory of the commodity this paper reinterprets marx s theory of the form of value in the context of his theory of the commodity building on the unresolved tension between marx s concept of value and the specific character of the labour constituting itself as value in his theory of commodity production it is argued that marx s is actually a theory of the mercantile form of value thus it becomes evident that the process of realisation of material production in commodity production and the process giving rise to money are the same and that they are only the material manifestation of the process of realisation of private and independent work as social labour this characterises commodity production as the unity in difference of a material and a social moment showing that marx s mercantile form of value is the conceptualisation of adam smith s invisible hand the paper also argues that marx s is not the theory of a money commodity copyright 2012 oup

from agriculture to rurality new approaches in territorial economics in the first part the paper presents the evolution of the rural develoment theories from 50s to nowadays consequently in the second part it is addressed the issue of how the transition from subsistance economy to traditional economy to agricultural economy to rural economy could delineate virtuous processes of local development in specific contexts this concept is futher developed in the third part where territorial development is analysed in accordance with international studies and more specifically with european ones and in the forth where the topic is critically focused in the framework of the brazilean literature

new labour and work time regulation a marxian analysis of the uk economy this paper examines the impact of work time regulation introduced by the uk s new labour governments 1997 to 2010 in doing so we return to marx s hypotheses regarding the length of the working day these include the arguments that class conflict over the length of the working day is inherently distributional in a surplus value sense and that workers often display a preference for reduced hours even with a proportionate reduction in pay our quantitative marxist methodology provides a way of assessing the pattern of surplus value before and during the period of office of the new labour governments and the distributional effects of regulation the impact of such regulations on workers preferences are examined through an investigation of british household panel survey data although many have been sceptical concerning the record of the last labour governments policies such as the working time regulations 1998 and the work life balance campaign 2000 are found to have been noteworthy innovations in the labour market this is all the more important given recent moves by the successor government to weaken work time regulation our results suggest the impact of these policy initiatives was broadly favourable though the effect on men and women was different

approximate surrogate production functions the cambridge debate showed that an aggregation of capital is not possible in general a recent investigation has found one example for reswitching and several for reverse capital deepening but the paradoxes appear to be infrequent the paper provides a theoretical justification of this result and shows how wage curves of input output matrices with small non dominant eigenvalues become quasi linear with some numeraires large random systems lead to the genesis of such states approximate surrogate production functions then seem possible a family of economic systems with constant capital composition allows construction of a surrogate production function copyright oxford university press

some examples of dynamic cournot duopoly with inventory this article analyzes a two period game where firms can produce inventory in the first period for sale in the second period we assume that revenues and costs are time invariant and that the firms are symmetric we focus on the nature and the existence of the subgame perfect equilibrium of this model we use examples to show that the nash value functions defined on the joint inventory vector are likely to be ill behaved in particular they need not be concave nor even continuous in the firm s own inventory as a result asymmetric equilibrium is possible when average production costs are falling single firm operation can occur in equilibrium nonexistence is also a distinct possibility

a classical model of the class struggle a game theoretic approach the class struggle is formalized as a differential game in a strictly supply side model an approach that synthesizes the models of lancaster and goodwin four different steady state equilibria are derived each corresponding to different assumptions about the degree to which each class is organized to promote its own interests in particular the goodwin growth cycle is shown to emerge from a world characterized by unorganized capitalists and workers in which individuals ignore the effects of their own actions on economywide variables more relevant for discussion of modern capitalism are the hierarchical equilibria especially the codetermination equilibrium in which the existence of a full employment equilibrium turns out to be problematic finally comparative statics results suggest that the incentives for technological change differ widely among the four regimes

an empirical investigation of paradoxes reswitching and reverse capital deepening in capital theory this paper examines the empirical relevance of the capital controversy the price model of sraffa and the dual models of the price and quantity systems of von neumann become the basis of the investigation in the course of the controversy it proved easy to construct theoretical examples which contradicted the fundamental neoclassical hypothesis of an inverse capital demand function this paper presents empirical examples for the first time thiry two input output tables from the oecd database serve as data as a result one envelope is found which involves reswitching reverse substitution of labour or reverse capital deepening are observed in about 3 65 of tested cases they involve at least two switchpoints copyright 2006 oxford university press

exploitation and time abstract this paper analyses exploitation and class formation in a dynamic context an intertemporal model of a subsistence economy is set up and among other results it is proved that in an interior equilibrium differential ownership of scarce productive assets is an inherent feature of a capitalist economy while exploitation tends to disappear in the long run asset inequality is therefore proved to be a normatively secondary though causally primary wrong it is also argued that these results raise several doubts about the possibility of providing robust micro foundations to marxian concepts by means of walrasian general equilibrium models

making room for smallholder cooperatives in tanzanian tea production can fairtrade do that the objective of this article is to examine the different ways that smallholders are brought into fairtrade certification schemes in the tanzanian tea industry we examine the different ownership relations of processing factories and the perceived benefits of these different arrangements we use descriptive qualitative analysis based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted between 2008 and 2010 to identify the significance between factory ownership organization and fairtrade certification we find that there is a movement toward innovation in the organizational strategies which includes new ownership arrangements of processing factories and outgrower contracts that have been associated with certified fairtrade production we also suggest that organizational innovation is significant for obtaining scheme success yet perceived benefits of and increased information about fairtrade production is independent from ownership shares in processing

speculative storage in imperfectly competitive markets markets for many commodities are characterized by imperfectly competitive production as well as substantial storage by speculators who are attracted by significant price volatility we examine how speculative storage affects the behavior of an oligopoly producing a commodity for which demand is subject to random shocks speculators compete with consumers when purchasing the commodity and then subsequently compete with producers when selling their stocks resulting in two opposing incentives on the one hand producers would like to increase production to capture future sales in advance by selling to speculators while on the other hand they would like to withhold production to deter speculation thereby eliminating the additional supply from speculators in future periods we find that the incentive to sell to speculators can be quite strong potentially resulting in prices sufficiently high to drive consumers from the market furthermore these incentives are non monotonic in the number of producers speculative storage occurs more frequently in a relatively concentrated oligopoly than in the extremes of monopoly or perfect competition

a progress report on marxian economic theory on the controversies in exploitation theory since okishio 1963 a progress report on marxian economic theory

what is this school called neoclassical economics what is this school called neoclassical economics does it exist should it where does the term neoclassical economics come from and is there any connection between any of the current interpretations of the term and its original meaning how do we make sense of competing current interpretations is there a sustainable formulation these and related questions are raised and answered in an attempt to bring clarity to ongoing economic discussion and debate thereby to under labour for a more relevant academic economics discipline

taking stock a critical assessment of recent research on inventories empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s no one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories macroeconomists routinely thought of inventories as a destabilizing factor yet the prevailing micro theory viewed inventories as a stabilizing factor it was a fascinating question that was barely explored instead somewhat inexplicably interest in inventories dried up as if inventories were of minor economic significance and little intrinsic interest by the early 1980s then economists once again knew something they had known in the 1950s that inventory investment is of first order importance in business cycles but they were also beginning to realize that the standard production smoothing buffer stock model of inventories was in deep trouble this paper focuses on developments since that realization

distributive shares in the us economy 1964 2001 specifying the labour theory of value in a way that distinguishes both productive from unproductive labour and production workers from supervisory workers this paper considers distributive shares in the us economy between 1964 and 2001 trends in productive and unproductive labour are explored in full time equivalents hours and money after 1979 there was a large shift of money value not matched by a shift in either hours or employment from the wages paid to productive labour to those paid to supervisory labour since the wage share in money value added of non supervisory labour in unproductive sectors was approximately constant the 1980s and 1990s also saw the profits share squeezed by the rising wage share of supervisory workers some implications of this are explored in the construction of a class rather than a factor approach to distributive shares

origins of exploitation and class value theory of pre capitalist economy both the class position of agents and their status as exploiters or exploited is endogenously determined as they optimize against asset constraints which limit their capacity to produce revenue the class exploitation correspondence principle cecp asserts that class and exploitation status are related in a classical way it is further shown that the class structure associated with a labor market can be generated isomorphically by a credit market demonstrating the functional equivalence of these markets morever these results hold in models of precapitalist subsistence economy showing that the phenomena of marxian exploitation and class are applicable in economic mechanisms other than capitalist ones the possibility for a general theory of exploitation is thereby suggested

inventories market structure and price volatility abstract the effect of inventories on the level and volatility of price is analyzed under alternative market structures in a fairly general setting it is shown that inventories have no effect on the average level of prices in a cournot duopoly in the absence of depreciation the effect of storage on price volatility is analyzed in a more restrictive linear quadratic setting in which it is found that imperfectly competitive producers make less use of inventories for smoothing random fluctuations than is efficient the effect of market structure on price volatility depends on whether demand shocks or cost shocks are more important

the distribution of price changes in oligopoly econometric analysis of the skew of price change distributions for an eighty industry sample over an eleven year period indicates that the distributions are less skewed in times of rapidly changing prices in concentrated oligopolies and in markets with little product heterogeneity the results provide evidence of less price staggering and greater pricing coordination by firms in times of high inflation and in oligopolistic markets respectively tight oligopolies also appear to have more symmetric distributions when prices are falling than when they are rising suggesting that price decreases are more readily followed than increases copyright 1993 by blackwell publishing ltd

the current economic crisis its nature and the course of academic economics the current crisis has triggered significant debate concerning economic theory and policy largely absent from this debate is an informed discussion of the methods used by economists in analysing the economy and formulating their proposals but method matters here i argue that current academic research practices need to be transformed before real insight can be achieved specifically i indicate why and how a more grounded framework than that presupposed by current research practices facilitates a potentially more fruitful approach to understanding the crisis

market structure marketing method and price instability data for metals sold on commodity exchanges and at prices set by producers are used to test the relationship between the organization of markets and the behavior of prices on the production side the question is whether prices are more stable in concentrated industries and on the sales side the question is whether markets where buyers are consumers have more stable prices than those with consumers and speculators the recent increase in metal price instability is explained by changes in the market structure and organization variables foremost is increased reliance on commodity exchanges declines in concentration are of less importance

the aggregate production function is not neoclassical standard postulates concerning the aggregate production function are about marginal productivities and the associated demands for labour and capital these demands are supposed to be negatively related to the factor prices namely the wage rate and the interest rate the theoretical cases in which these neoclassical properties fail to hold are regarded as anomalies we compute the aggregate values for production capital and labour and find that the neoclassical postulates do not hold for the detailed dataset that we consider the obvious implication of this result is that the models and analysis based on the aggregate neoclassical production functions are ill founded as they are based on something that does not exist

understanding the marxian notion of exploitation a summary of the so called transformation problem between marxian values and competitive prices the ending in the second part of the article the author examines the so called problem of transformation first he analyze certain contradiction faced by marx in the third volume of capital in studying the question of how to transform the cost into the price then he turns to the problem of inverse transformation and argues that marx procedure works only in a single case equal organic composition of capital the third part of the article bibliography provides an overview of the work on the analysis of marx s theory

commodity price stabilization in imperfect or cartelized markets most studies of commodity price stabilization assume that all agents behave competitively however many commodities suitable for stockpiling are produced by countries with a significant share of the world market and commodity agreements themselves often result in cartelization of the market the paper explores the consequences of market power for the choice of storage rule and the degree of price stabilization it finds that with linear demand dominant producers choose more stable prices than under perfect competition and price stability increases with their market share with constant elastic demand the competitive degree of price stabilization is achieved

the transformation problem abstract the history of the marxian transformation problem is surveyed from 1885 to the present particular emphasis is placed on the less well known literature and the focus is on problems of interpretation rather than on technicalities a substantial bibliography is provided

the cyclical behavior of strategic inventories this paper presents a model in which inventories are used by a duopoly to deter deviations from an implicitly collusive arrangement higher inventories allow firms to punish cheaters more strongly and can thus help to maintain collusion we show that when demand is high the incentive to deviate increases so that increases in inventories may be optimal for the duopoly this rationalizes the observed positive correlation between inventories and sales in our empirical section we show that as our model predicts this correlation is more important in concentrated industries we also provide several examples where inventories have been a factor in cartel behavior

monopoly behaviour with speculative storage abstract we analyze the effects of competitive storage when the production of the good is controlled by a monopolist the existence of competitive storers serves to reduce the monopolist s effective demand when speculators are selling and to increase it when they are buying this results in the monopolist manipulating the frequency of stockouts and hence the price smoothing effects of competitive storage we find that competitive storage affects both the level and the volatility of price under monopoly the average price level is higher with storage due to the monopolist s desire to induce stockouts by occasionally keeping the price just at the level that induces a stockout although storage does reduce the volatility of prices under monopoly production prices are more volatile than they would be under perfectly competitive production even though stockouts occur less frequently under monopoly these results are demonstrated through closed form solutions of the two period version of the model and computational solutions to the infinite horizon version of the model

actual labor values in a general model of production in contrast to counterfactual linear programming definitions of labor values this chapter introduces an at least equivalent definition of such values for the general case of joint production which is exclusively based on actual data this task is accomplished by extending marx s concept of individual values from multiple activities to joint production by means of certain price ratios at those points where production data are insufficient to ensure the positiveness of embodied labor time our approach generalizes the simple formula that relates labor values to monetary input output tables and it reformulates the labor theory of value in such a way that the theoretical priority of the case of a uniform composition of capital is reaffirmed in the concluding pages of his book marx s economics it is suggested by morishima that marxian economists ought radically to change their attitude towards the labor theory of value since in general the value system of the methods of production actually adopted in a capitalistic economy may be determined to be negative indefinite or even contradictory to the postulate of the uniform rate of exploitation morishima 1973 p 193 he then continues by proposing that optimal labor values the shadow prices of certain linear programming problems which minimize the amount of labor needed to produce given bundles of net output should take the place of actual labor values when production models of a more general kind than the simple leontief model are to be considered an interpretation of labor values which has been worked out in detail in morishima 1974 and has become a widely accepted approach to labor values and the labor theory of value for all types of multiple production systems

the whiggish foundations of marxian and sraffian economics the first half of the paper discusses what is wrong with whig history and why it is wrong to distort the past the author s views are compared with those of noted historians of economics this discussion provides motivation for the second half of the paper which focuses on whiggish accounts of the scientifically progressive character of mainstream marxian and sraffian economics that rest heavily upon proofs of internal inconsistency in marx s own theories the paper argues that the inconsistencies are actually products of whiggish misinterpretation thus it is not the case that progress has taken place through correction of error mainstream marxian and sraffian theories are not corrections of the original theories but alternatives to them

the relative rigidity of monopoly pricing this paper seeks to explain why monopolies keep their nominal prices constant for longer periods than do tight oligopolies the authors show that cost changes create a larger incentive for duopolists to change their prices while demand changes tend to have a greater effect on a monopolist when both costs and demand are affected by small changes in the overall price level the cost effect dominates in the presence of a small fixed cost of changing prices therefore duopolists change their prices in response to smaller perturbations in underlying conditions copyright 1987 by american economic association

the co operative and the corporation competing visions of the future of fair trade this paper provides an analysis of the fair trade network in the north through a comparative assessment of two distinctly different fair trade certified roasters planet bean a worker owned co operative in guelph ontario and starbucks coffee company the world s largest specialty roaster the two organizations are assessed on the basis of their distinct visions of the fair trade mission and their understandings of consumer sovereignty it is concluded that the objectives of planet bean are more compatible with the moral mission of fair trade even while the network has become increasingly dependent on the market reach of corporations like starbucks raising difficult prospects for the future of fair trade

in the name of conservation cafe practices and fair trade in mexico consumers concerns for the environment have led to the creation of niche markets quality certifications and labelling systems built by activists and ngos these systems were adopted by agribusiness such firms try to capture consumers and react to opinion campaigns whilst appropriating the conservation or fair discourse this leads to the rise of new forms of third party certifications of food production based on private standards and hence to new forms of contract relations between producers and buyers the nature of these relationships is not always evident in these new labels or in the discourse built to justify them this is particularly so in the case of goods produced in the south to be traded and sold in the north as the case of starbucks illustrates by the end of the 1990s starbucks operating through an ngo called conservation international ci arrived at the region of el triunfo in chiapas and contacted the producers cooperatives that were trying to find a market for their product ci promoted starbucks standards to raise the coffee quality and won the control over the production system meanwhile the producers forced to sell their coffee through the largest trade company amsa against whom the cooperatives were created lost the control over their own organization when some cooperatives refused the deal they suffered divisions but could survive thanks the fair trade ft network in chiapas

marx s transformation problem and pasinetti s vertically integrated subsystems pasinetti 1988 constructs a complete generalization of marx s transformation problem in the context of a non uniform growth model by proving that production prices are not proportional to the physical quantities of labour supplied to vertically hyper integrated subsystems pasinetti therefore restricts the labour theory of value to a pre institutional stage of analysis in this paper i demonstrate that the transformation problem dissolves once we consider the vertically integrated subsystems induced by the specific institutional setup of a capitalist economy i prove that production prices both in steady state and non uniform growth models are proportional to the physical quantities of labour supplied to vertically super integrated subsystems in consequence the labour theory of value suitably generalized also applies at the institutional stage of analysis

one million miles to go taking the axiomatic road to defining exploitation this paper analyses the marxian theory of exploitation a general axiomatic approach is developed which is appropriate to study the concept of exploitation what it is and how it should be captured empirically two properties are presented that capture some fundamental marxian insights it is shown that contrary to the received view there exists a nonempty class of definitions of exploitation that preserve the relation between exploitation and profits called profitexploitation correspondence principle in general economies with heterogeneous agents complex class structures and production technologies with heterogeneous labour inputs however among the main approaches only the so called new interpretation satisfies the profitexploitation correspondence principle in general jel b51

a re in statement of the labour theory of value this paper surveys and argues for an account of labor values and prices in the marxian tradition that is not subject to the usual criticisms concerning their conceptual coherence and empirical relevance this reformulation first suggested independently of each other by g dumeenil and d k foley provides a powerful account that overturns almost a century of misconceived orthodoxy in doing so it enables a theoretically coherent account of the value of labor power and an empirical account of the fundamental categories of capitalism copyright 1994 by oxford university press

the role of obsolescence and inventory costs in providing commitment this paper modifies the cournot and stackelberg models to allow the firms to sell less than they have produced and to store the unsold portion of their output as inventory even if one of the firms can choose its output before the other if it is costless to carry unsold goods forward then the cournot outcome emerges we show however that costs of carrying the inventory forward endow the firms with a limited degree of commitment to sell what they have produced this partially restores the first mover advantage if the firms choose their outputs simultaneously the cournot outcome emerges and has locally consistent conjectures

markov puppy dogs and related animals abstract it is shown that steady state markov perfect equilibria of discrete time infinite horizon quadratic adjustment cost games differ from equilibria of their infinitely repeated counterpart games with zero adjustment costs even though no adjustment costs are paid in the steady state in contrast to continuous time games the limit of these equilibria as adjustment costs approach zero is the same as the equilibria of their static counterpart games a classification scheme is presented and it is shown that the taxonomy is identical to that of analogous two stage games such as those analyzed by fudenberg and tirole american economic review papers and proceedings 1984 74 361 366 this classification is useful in that it implies that steady state equilibria need not be explicitly calculated to analyze qualitatively the effects of adjustment costs in strategic environments it is also argued that estimated conjectural variations parameters may capture a well defined property of strategic interaction in a dynamic game

going multinational under exchange rate uncertainty abstract we analyze a model where an exporting firm competes a la cournot in a foreign market the firm faces exchange rate uncertainty and has the option to invest abroad the paper contributes four results first real option pricing techniques are used to derive the optimal timing rule of the investment and the price of the firm and foreign competitors second the sunk cost of entry into the foreign market introduces hysteresis in direct investment flows we find that the degree of hysteresis grows with the number of firms in the industry third we determine the conditions under which dumping may appear and the role of fdi in precluding this type of dumping fourth tariffs have the well known fdi inducing effect more so in less competitive markets and are more effective at deterring delocation furthermore a tariff might have the effect of triggering dumping

value price and exploitation the logic of the transformation problem this paper tries to clarify the logical structure of the relationship between labor values and prices from an axiomatic perspective the famous transformation problem is interpreted as an impossibility result for a specific interpretation of value theory based on specific assumptions and definitions a comprehensive review of recent literature is provided which shows that there are various theoretically relevant and logically consistent alternative interpretations based on different assumptions and definitions

the possibility of social choice the subject of social choice includes within its capacious frame various problems with the common feature of relating social judgments and group decisions to the views and interests of the individuals who make up the society or the group some challenges and foundational problems faced by social choice theory as a discipline are discussed social choice theory is a subject in which formal and mathematical techniques have been very extensively used voting based procedures are entirely natural for some kinds of social choice problems such as elections referendums or committee decisions they are however altogether unsuitable for many other problems of social choice impossibility results in social choice theory led by the pioneering work of arrow 1951 have often been interpreted as being thoroughly destructive of the possibility of reasoned and democratic social choice including welfare economics that view is argued against

notes and comments new solution or re in statement a reply the formalisations of the labour theory of value that culminated in morishima 1973 pasinetti 1977 and steedman 1977 merely served to show that the labour theory of value had no operational significance in the explanation of observable phenomena the standard interpretation of the marxian account of labour values monetary prices and the relation between them has technology and labour input requirements determining labour values the same technology and labour input requirements plus a specification of the wage determining relative prices and a normalisation condition determining price levels but this approach leads precisely nowhere the only meaningful relation between labour values and prices is through the proposition that a positive rate of exploitation is a neces sary and sufficient condition for a positive rate of profit a proposition that can evidently be reversed and whose empirical implications are meagre in the extreme and issues of joint production and choice of technique problematise the whole approach all of this is well known

forward trading and storage in a cournot duopoly a dynamic game is presented that models the effects of forward trading and storage in an imperfectly competitive market it is shown that the pro competitive effects of forward trading found in previous work are weakened by the addition of storage but not eliminated the price level lies between that of a cournot game and that of a game with forward trading but without storage

equality of resources implies equality of welfare if one is an egalitarian should one try to equalize resources available to agents or to equalize their welfares with a suitably general conception of what resources are these two conceptions cannot be distinguished an allocation mechanism is defined on a space of economies and is required to satisfy various axioms that are necessary conditions for equalizing resources among a population the unique mechanism satisfying these axioms on a large domain of economies is the one that allocates commodities so as to equalize utilities of the agents methodologically the theorem is a generalization of bargaining theory because the mechanisms are defined on commodity space

class and exploitation in general convex cone economies abstract in this paper we examine what appropriate formulations for labor exploitation are in order to explain the emergence of class and exploitation status in capitalist economies given the well known controversy pertaining to plausible formulations for labor exploitation in joint production economies we propose an axiom axiom for labor exploitation le which every appropriate formulation of labor exploitation should satisfy using this axiom the necessary and sufficient condition for plausible formulations of labor exploitation is characterized to verify class exploitation correspondence principle cecp roemer 1982 according to this cecp no longer holds in general convex cone economies if the well known formulations of labor exploitation such as morishima 1974 and roemer 1982 chapter 5 are applied therefore we propose two new definitions of labor exploitation each of which verifies cecp

characterizations of bargaining solutions in production economies with unequal skills in production economies with unequal skills this paper characterizes bargaining solutions by using axioms on allocation rules rather than axioms on classical bargaining solutions we introduce a new axiom consistency w r t technological innovations so that the non welfaristic characterizations of bargaining solutions in the production economies are provided by the characterizations we can classify the three bargaining solutions the nash the kalai smorodinsky and the egalitarian solutions from the viewpoint of responsibility and compensation discussed by dworkin

sraffa leontief lange the political economy of input output economics abstract the fields of political economy and input output economics are commonly unrelated due to the discrepancy between the qualitative and quantitative analysis in economic science with the aim to overcome this separation this paper relates the basic model of production of commodities by means of commodities to the paradigm of planning as the substitute for the market by sketching the logical historical development of input output economics the model of sraffa the leontief matrices and the political economy of marxist tradition represented by oskar lange are strongly associated so that the typical qualitative concepts of planning law of value and historical development of the capitalist system can be connected to the quantitative framework of matrix programming and mathematical formalization

values prices of production and market prices some more evidence from the greek economy this paper extends the empirical investigation of the relation between labour values and different price forms in the case of the greek economy subjecting the labour theory of value to empirical tests with data from various countries helps in the derivation of general conclusions regarding its empirical validity and practical usefulness our results on the closeness of values and prices as measured by their absolute deviation and correlation the shape of the wage profit curves the predictive power of labour values over market prices compared with other value bases and the comparison of fundamental marxian categories when estimated in value and price terms provide further support for the empirical strength of the labour theory of value

aggregate capital productivity in the us economy 1964 2001 in the decomposition of the us macroeconomic pre tax rate of profit as the product of profit share and capital productivity this paper considers the role of capital productivity over the period 1964 2001 the primary finding is that prior to 1982 capital productivity fell because capital deepening proceeded faster than labour productivity growth whereas from 1982 to 1997 the opposite occured if prior to 1982 the us economy was characterised by marx biased technical progress what requires explanation is why labour productivity continued to grow after 1982 in the absence of sufficient capital deepening the paper explores various hypotheses contrasts neoclassical and classical notions of technical change and investigates the robustness of its results to the productive unproductive distinction and to accounting for changes in capacity utilisation

on measuring the deviation of prices from values it has often been found useful to measure in some way the extent to which with profit prices diverge from zero profit values but it is not satisfactory to employ a measure which varies with the choice of numeraire for this element of arbitrariness has nothing to do with the central idea of asking how much the direction of the price vector differs from that of the value vector the authors develop a measure which involves no numeraire and then illustrate its use with data from the united kingdom the irish republic and australia copyright 1998 by oxford university press

the rigidity of prices this paper uses evidence on individual transaction prices to analyze price behavior the evidence shows that for many transactions pricesremain rigid for periods exceeding one year the rigidity of price ispositively correlated with industry concentration for several productsthe correlation of price changes across buyers is low the paper alsoinvestigates the relationship between price rigidity price change andthe length of time a buyer and seller have been doing business together the author interprets the evidence as emphasizing the importance of nonprice rationing and the inadequacy of models in whichprice movements alone clear markets copyright 1986 by american economic association

labour time versus alternative value bases a research note this paper provides empirical support for the law of value understood as the proposition that embodied labor time is conserved in exchanges of commodities market prices are well correlated with the sum of direct and indirect labor content is it possible to produce equally good correlations by taking the sum of direct and indirect x content where x is some input other than labor time the authors repeat the analysis for electricity iron and steel and oil and show that the answer is no the high correlations in the case of labor time are therefore not a statistical artifact copyright 1997 by oxford university press

market structure and the stability and volatility of electricity prices by using a novel approach in this paper 2 analysis we have found that electricity prices most of the time have increased in stability and decreased in volatility when the nordic power market has expanded and the degree of competition has increased that electricity prices at nord pool have been generated by a stochastic dynamic system that most often has become more stable during the step wise integration of the nordic power market means that this market is less sensitive to shocks after the

inventory holding as a strategic weapon to deter entry recent papers by dixit 1980 and eaton and lipsey 1981 have explored the strategic use of committed product specific capital by an incumbent firm in order to influence a post entry equilibrium and in some cases make entry unattractive by committing or sinking part of the production costs prior to entry the incumbent creates a credible shift in its own reaction function if entry should occur in this way the payoffs in the post entry equilibrium can be influenced to the incumbent s advantage the entry game thus consists of two stages the first in which the incumbent is able to strategically commit itself prior to entry and the second or post entry period in which a duopoly equilibrium is realized the more costs that are put up front by the incumbent the greater is the post entry output it will wish to sell for a given output of the entrant and the lower will be the resulting equilibrium price if the set up or fixed costs of entry are sufficiently high entry may be rendered unprofitable this paper extends the idea in a natural way all the production costs of a quantity of output can be sunk or committed by stockpiling inventory of the product the stock of inventory held by the incumbent firm represents a credible shift in its reaction function in response to entry in the following way the inventory is a stock that can be sold off over time in a way consistent with intertemporal profit maximization constrained by the presence of the entrant moreover the threat to sell off the inventory in response to entry is credible since given that entry has occurred the opportunity cost of the inventory is zero it seems reasonable to require that any strategic asymmetry between incumbent and entrant should be restricted to commitments made by the former prior to entry conditional on such commitments the post entry game should give neither firm a strategic advantage this requirement is the same as the game theoretic concept of perfectness 1 entry can be credibly deterred because the entrant knows that were entry to take place it would be in the incumbent s own interest to follow the anticipated sales programme of inventory in order to demonstrate that entry may be deterred by holding a stock of inventory that is sufficiently large that deterrence can be made the perfect equilibrium of the complete entry game the properties of the equilibrium with entry must be derived the post entry equilibrium is modelled here as a pair of nash strategies in sales programmes if the sales programme anticipated by the entrant in the post entry equilibrium implies a negative present value entry will be deterred thus successful entry deterrence implies that the equilibrium with entry is never realized the incumbent can then continue to receive monopoly profits less the holding cost of the inventory which serves as a credible deterrent to entry but is never sold

heterogeneous labour and the fundamental marxian theorem as was pointed out by morishima at the end of his famous book on marx s economics the heterogeneity of labour is a serious dilemma for marx s theory of exploitation especially for the so called fundamental marxian theorem the problem which should be separated from the peculiarities of joint production consists in finding an appropriate reduction of the various types of labour to one common unit recently bowles and gintis have undertaken an interesting reformulation of the marxian theory of value with respect to heterogeneous labour by avoiding any reduction at all bowles and gintis 1977 1978 cf also steedman 1977 holliinder 1978 but for the purpose of the fundamental marxian theorem this only shifts the problem from the heterogeneity of labour to the heterogeneity of the respective rates of exploitation the aim of the present paper is to extend the fundamental marxian theorem without joint production from homogeneous to heterogeneous labour section 3 this extension is based on a new concept called the standard reduction of labour because of its dual relationship to sraffa s standard commodity section 2 for some arguments a certain type of matrices called sraffa matrices is needed which generalize the quasiirreducible matrices as introduced by bowles and gintis appendix standard reduction implies always a uniform rate of exploitation whereas the same is true for the reduction by wage rates only in special cases for example uniform consumption labour inputs only prices proportional to labour values for the first two cases cf morishima 1978 hence in general standard reduction and reduction by wage rates are different

labour values prices of production and the missing equalisation tendency of profit rates evidence from the german economy during recent years several empirical studies have found that deviations from labour values to market prices are quite small however most of these articles do not offer a detailed reason for this result in this paper two theoretical justifications of the labour theory of value are brought together with some data concerning labour values prices of production and market prices on the basis of german input output tables from 2000 and 2004 in addition the statistical characteristics of profit rates are analysed both of the theoretical arguments are much in line with the empirical observations because there is only a slight transformation tendency and at the same time profit rates and capital intensity are negatively correlated moreover during the period under observation the german economy seems to be in a state of statistical equilibrium copyright oxford university press

quantitative empirical research in marxist political economy a selective review this paper surveys quantitative empirical research in some key areas of marxist political economy following an introductory section on the value controversy the paper surveys quantitative empirical research on the following topics a marxist national accounts b classical marxist theory of relative prices c probabilistic political economy d profitability analysis and e classical marxian theories of growth and technical change i end by highlighting two important puzzles in the extant literature

a progress report on marxian economic theory on the controversies in exploitation theory since okishio 1963 this report explores the development of exploitation theory in mathematical marxian economics by reviewing the main controversies surrounding the proper definition of exploitation since the contribution of okishio the report first examines the debates on the fundamental marxian theorem and class exploitation correspondence principle developed mainly in the 1970s and 1980s followed by the property relation theory of exploitation by roemer then the more recent exploitation theory proposed by vrousalis and wright is introduced finally the report introduces and comments on recent axiomatic studies of exploitation by focusing on the work of veneziani and yoshihara

profits equal surplus value on average and the significance of this result for the marxian theory of accumulation being a new contribution to engels prize essay competition based on random matrices and on manuscripts recently published in the mega for the first time marx s justification of his theory of surplus value in the face of unequal compositions of capital by interpreting total profits as a redistribution of surplus value is not correct in general however it is shown here that the equality holds if the input matrices are random and the labour theory of value holds in a sense to be specified on average manuscripts recently published for the first time confirm that to the end marx trusted his approach to the theory of value in that he continued to use the identity of the aggregates of capital and surplus in value and in price terms his insistence was rooted in his philosophy an attempt is made to clarify his use of a hegelian methodology by comparing hegel s and marx s approaches to the foundation of the infinitesimal calculus the article concludes with marx s late reconsiderations of his theory of the falling rate of profit which also continue to be based on the equality of profit and surplus value

the dynamics of inequalities and unequal exchange of labor in intertemporal linear economies abstract introducing a concept of fairness of economic allocations namely exploitation as the unequal exchange of labor henceforth ue exploitation by generalizing roemer s 1981 1982a seminal models this paper aims to answer the following two questions in the context of an intertemporal economy with linear technology how is income and wealth inequality related or unrelated to the existence and persistence of ue exploitation what are the mechanisms driving the persistent existence of ue exploitation in growing economies agents are ue exploited resp exploiters if the amount of labor that they contribute to the economy is bigger resp smaller than the amount of labor received by them via their income it is proved first that ue exploitation is monotonically correlated to functional income inequality second it is shown that unless agents discount the future asset inequalities are necessary but not sufficient for the persistence of ue exploitation and capital accumulation leading to the disappearance of ue exploitation cannot be ruled out in equilibrium third it is shown that regardless of whether agents discount the future labor saving technical progress may yield sustained growth with persistent ue exploitation by keeping labor abundant relative to capital which restrains wages from rising unlike in models with differentiable production functions this mechanism does not rely on changes in the marginal productivity of inputs and it is entirely driven by the interaction between innovation and labor markets

notes and comments a re in statement of the labour theory of value a comment the aim of this paper is to show that the main conclusions in mohun s 1994 paper rest on an implicit assumption the composition of net output has to remain constant when this is removed some paradoxical results are obtained copyright 2000 by oxford university press