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

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

the role of collateral in credit markets with imperfect information abstract the paper analyzes the structure of credit market equilibrium under imperfect information collateralization and credit rationing are compared as alternative means to cope with problems of adverse selection and moral hazard it is shown that lenders may use collateral as a self selection and incentive mechanism rationing occurs only if the borrowers collaterizable wealth is too small to allow perfect sorting or to create sufficiently strong incentives whenever there is rationing in an equilibrium some borrowers are charged the maximum amount of collateral

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

a pragmatic approach to capital account liberalization in the mid 1990s mainstream economists of nearly all stripes commonly recommended capital account liberalization that is allowing a free flow of funds in and out of a country s economy as an essential step in the process of economic development but then came the east asian financial crisis of 1997 98 in which even seemingly healthy and well managed economies like those of south korea were engulfed by massive capital outflows and tremendous currency volatility and capital account liberalization became quite controversial in the economics profession a decade later now that time has quelled passions and intervening research can shed more light on the debate it appears that both the costs and benefits of capital account liberalization may have been misunderstood in that earlier debate now it appears that the main benefits of capital account liberalization for emerging markets are indirect more related to their role in building other institutions than to the increased financing provided by capital inflows and these indirect benefits are important enough that countries should look for creative approaches to capital account liberalization that would help attain these benefits while reducing the risks countries don t have much choice but to plan for capital account liberalization because capital accounts are de facto becoming more open over time whatever governments may do to try to control them

credit rationing in small scale enterprises special microenterprise programmes in ecuador small scale enterprises receive several forms of aid but many are denied access to formal loans a demand and supply model is estimated to analyse the factors lenders use to ration credit in special microenterprise programmes the results reveal that suppliers do not discriminate against less profitable enterprises and entrepreneurs who have not completed their high school education however these entrepreneurs have a smaller demand for external finance from the microenterprise programmes than more profitable enterprises and entrepreneurs who have graduated from high school

the effects of tax policy on aggregate agricultural investment the effects of tax policies on aggregate agricultural investment are examined results from this analysis suggest that tax policies are effective in promoting agricultural investment nearly 20 percent of net investment in agricultural equipment during the period 1956 through 1978 is attributed to tax policy from 1956 to 1978 tax policy has stimulated in real dollars over 5 billion in net investment in equipment and in excess of 1 billion in structures

agricultural household models extensions applications and policy this book presents the basic model of an agricultural household that underlies most of the case studies undertaken so far the model assumes that households are price takers and is therefore recursive the decisions modeled include those affecting production and the demand for inputs and those affecting consumption and the supply of labor comparative results on selected elasticities are presented for a number of economies the empirical significance of the approach is demonstrated in a comparison of models that treat production and consumption decisions separately and those in which the decisionmaking process is recursive the book summarizes the implications of agricultural pricing policy for the welfare of farm households marketed surplus the demand for nonagricultural goods and services the rural labor market budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings in addition it is shown that the basic model can be extended in order to explore the effects of government policy on crop composition nutritional status health saving and investment and to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the effects on budget revenues and foreign exchange earnings methodological topics primarily the data requirements of the basic model and its extensions along with aggregation market interaction uncertainty and market imperfections are discussed the most important methodological issues the question of the recursive property of these models is also discussed

the impact of credit on peasant productivity and differentiation in nicaragua abstract an endogenous switching regressions framework is used to structure and identify the impact of credit on small farm food production in nicaragua the results which emerge weakly support the hypothesis that credit had a positive impact on production and could be expected to reduce the pattern of structurally unbalanced growth in nicaraguan agriculture however the estimated impact is of a form which implies a process of differentiation and unequal growth in the peasant sector in the wake of the new opportunities afforded by credit

real exchange rate overvaluation and currency crises evidence from thailand this article examines real exchange rate rer misalignment in thailand in the lead up to the 1997 1998 currency crisis the methodology involves estimating the long run equilibrium rer based on the internal and external balance approach rer misalignment is measured by comparing the actual rer with the estimated long run equilibrium rer the results suggest that there was a persistent rer overvaluation from 1991 up to the onset of the crisis in 1997 too much net short term capital inflows and government expenditure expansion were the main contributory factors after the massive depreciation of nominal exchange rate during the crisis the rer seems to have gradually returned to its long run equilibrium level

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

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

on the optimal timing of capital taxes for many kinds of capital depreciation rates change systematically with the age of the capital consider an example that captures essential aspects of human capital both regarding its accumulation and its depreciation a worker obtains knowledge in period 0 then uses this knowledge in production in periods 1 and 2 and thereafter retires here depreciation accelerates it occurs at a 100 rate after period 2 and at a lower perhaps zero rate before that the present paper analyzes the implications of non constant depreciation rates for the optimal timing of taxes on capital income the main finding is that under natural assumptions the path of tax rates over time must be oscillatory oscillatory tax rates are optimal when depreciation rates accelerate with the age of the capital as in the above example and provided that the government can commit to the path of future tax rates but cannot apply different tax rates in a given year to different vintages of capital

access to capital and its impact on agrarian structure and productivity in kenya access to capital and its distribution across agents can profoundly shape the structure and performance of an agrarian market economy it is conceptually useful to distinguish between ex ante and ex post capital access ex ante capital access denotes the ability of agents to finance production costs e g labor and purchased inputs costs which must be paid ex ante that is prior to the actual realization of production ex post capital access that is access to capital after the realization of the production process is of particular importance as an insurance substitute in low income agrarian economies where contingency markets are imperfect buoyant ex post capital access would permit an individual to stabilize consumption year to year even as production fluctuates annually a number of theoretical models have ex

dynamic input demand functions and resource adjustment for us agriculture state evidence abstract the paper presents an econometric model of dynamic agricultural input demand functions that include research based technical change and autoregressive disturbances and fits the model to annual data for a set of state aggregates pooled over 1950 1982 the methodological approach is one of developing a theoretical foundation for a dynamic input demand system and accepting state aggreage behavior as approximated by nonlinear adjustment costs and long term profit maximization although other studies have largely ignored autocorrelation in dynamic input demand systems the results show shorter adjustment lags with autocorrelation than without dynamic input demand own price elasticities for the six input groups are inelastic and the demand functions possess significant cross price and research effects

does lack of access to formal credit constrain agricultural production evidence from the land tenancy market in rural india while it is commonly believed that lack of access to government subsidized formal credit underlies observed differences in farm productivity in rural india there is little empirical evidence on this issue in this paper i address this issue by examining whether households use the farm land rental market to equilibrate their access to formal credit as they are known to do in the case of other imperfectly marketable inputs this research reveals however that the advantage formal borrowers enjoy in the tenancy market does not reflect their access to formal credit per se but their greater ownership of inputs such as irrigated land

the impacts of tax reform on agricultural households estimates of tax reform s impacts usually concentrate on macroeconomic impacts but attention at the industry or sectoral level is often limited our study uses a computable general equilibrium cge model to estimate the disaggregated impacts of the tax cuts and jobs act tcja of 2018 which lowered personal and corporate tax rates focusing on agriculture we use survey data to calculate how the tcja would change the tax rates faced by farmers at the sector level we use internal revenue service data to calculate tax rates for all other producers we then simulate the economy wide and sectoral effects of tcja we find that the tcja would cause a reduction in agricultural output as resources would be reallocated to other sectors using our survey data we extend the cge results to measure the impacts to farm households from changes in on and off farm income we find that most farm households would have income gains from tax reform our tax reform scenario highlights the fact that investment weighs heavily on model results that is firms that are attractive to domestic and foreign investment have gains in demand for their products while other sectors such as primary agriculture experience decreases in production a sensitivity analysis that reduces the attractiveness of the united states in foreign investment shows smaller impacts of tcja especially for macroeconomic variables

credit constraints credit unions and small scale producers in guatemala abstract efficient and equitable development outcomes may depend in part on whether formal financial institutions leave low wealth producers tightly constrained in their access to credit if so can cooperative institutions efficiently relax these constraints these issues are explored using survey data gathered from 950 small scale producer households in areas of guatemala with market oriented credit unions that mobilize savings and make unsubsidized loans nonprice rationing by banks is found to be common among lower wealth households while credit unions relax credit constraints for a significant portion of those rationed by banks but not the poorest of the study households

the transformation problem solved the so called general transformation problem is introduced and it is shown that any actual economy of multiproduct firms with joint production and technical change is traceable to a corresponding labor theory of value economy of labor values and unrewarded labor as profits conversely the labor theory of value economies are transformable into the economies of prices and profits and profits by means of prices of labor can be distributed at will including the celebrated case of equalized profit rates even negative profits in some or all units all economies are therefore labor theory of value economies distorted by prices the author claims to have solved the transformation problem and that his work validates the labor theory of value in the spirit of david ricardo and karl marx but without marx s tools copyright 1989 by oxford university press

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

compositional effects of capital controls theory and evidence this paper examines the effects of capital controls on the composition of inter national capital flows paying particular attention to debt inflows versus equity inflows a two period small open economy model with stochastic second period output and asymmetric information between domestic agents and international financiers is utilised to generate predictions regarding the effects of capital controls on the relative use of debt versus equity for financing first period investment these capital control implications are then investigated with quarterly frequency panel data for latin america capital controls are found to significantly affect the composition of the capital account

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

supply response and investment in the canadian food processing industry this paper reports on the estimation of a dynamic model of the food manufacturing industry in canada its major objectives are to analyze the determinants of investments and the production structure of the industry an important finding of the study is that the hypothesis of instantaneous capital adjustment to changing market conditions is statistically rejected capital stock adjustment to optimal levels takes approximately two and one third years another result is that although the industry is responsive to price changes a general pattern of inelastic factor demand and output supply prevails in the short run intermediate run and even in the long run

tax reform and land using sectors in the u s economy a general equilibrium analysis a computable general equilibrium model of the u s economy is used to assess the effects of the tax reform act of 1986 on land using sectors forestry and three classes of agriculture the model s components include twelve production sectors six consumer groups a balanced budget government sector and a zero surplus foreign sector in relative terms tax reform reduces total value added output in land using sectors to a greater extent than other sectors in the economy experiments are also performed comparing partial and general equilibrium specifications of the economy and the impact of choice of input substitution elasticities

who is credit constrained in the u s economy an important assumption of the life cycle model of consumption is the postulate of perfect capital markets this hypothesis has recently been challenged by substantial empirical evidence hall and mishkin 1982 using the panel study of income dynamics estimate that 20 percent of united states families are liquidity constrained mariger 1986 derives a life cycle model with endogenous liquidity constraints and using a cross section estimates this fraction to be 19 4 percent hubbard and judd 1986 simulate a model with a constraint on net worth which shows that with reasonable assumptions about preferences 19 0 percent of united states consumers are liquidity constrained the emerging consensus points therefore to a fraction of approximately 20 percent of the population behaving in a manner that is inconsistent with the pure life cycle model in addition hayashi 1985 and zeldes 1989 investigate the correlation among consumption wealth and income for various population groups and infer that liquidity constraints are more important for younger families with low levels of wealth and saving the main limitation of these studies is that in their data sets constrained consumers are not observable and have to be identified via indirect evidence thus there is as yet little firm evidence about the characteristics of the consumers who are likely to be credit constrained this paper adopts an approach that differs from previous tests for liquidity constraints because it makes use of data where constrained consumers are observable and explicitly links their existence to credit market imperfections and personal characteristics the data drawn from the 1983 survey of consumer finances scf and described in section ii provide information on individuals whose request for credit has been rejected by financial intermediaries in section iii a model is developed in which consumers and lenders behavior jointly determines the probability that a consumer is rationed in the credit market this probability is then

temporary stabilization predetermined exchange rates the paper analyzes the impact of a stabilization policy based on a temporary reduction in the rate of devaluation against a background in which a constant rate of devaluation has no real effects it is shown that the temporary policy does and furthermore that the real effects tend to become bigger in absolute value as the horizon of the temporary policy is shortened the central discussion is carried out in terms of a one good cash in advance model with perfect capital mobility and ramsey type consumers results are extended to account for home goods and variable velocity the roles of capital mobility and banking liberalization are briefly discussed

the effects of uncertainty and adjustment costs on investment in the almond industry a neoclassical model of investment behavior is developed wherein firms are assumed to maximize the expected present value of net revenue under leontief technology prices and yields are assumed to be stochastic this framework yields investment as a function of the expected present value of the output from one unit of capital and the variance of the expected value this theory is applied to investment in the almond industry the model outperforms both a model without uncertainty and one with neither uncertainty nor adjustment costs using in sample and out of sample tests copyright 1989 by mit press

empirical measurement of credit rationing in agriculture a methodological survey empirical analysis of rural credit market failure has been of key scientific and political interest in recent years the aim of this article is to give an overview of the various methods for measuring credit rationing that are employed in the literature furthermore the methods are subjected to a comparative evaluation of their specific strengths or shortcomings six approaches are distinguished measurement of loan transaction costs analysis of qualitative information collected in interviews analysis of quantitative information collected in interviews using the credit limit concept analysis of spill over effects with regard to secondary credit sources econometric household modeling and the econometric analysis of dynamic investment decisions an explicit comparison with a first best solution is impossible in the first three approaches since they essentially rely on a subjective assessment of borrowers access to credit based on qualitative or quantitative indicators the fifth and sixth approaches allow a rigorous interpretation in the framework of neoclassical equilibrium theory the fourth approach takes an intermediate position since spill over on segmented loan markets reveals a willingness to pay with regard to the supposedly less expensive but rationed primary source the approaches are fairly data demanding in general usually requiring specific data on loan transactions even so most approaches are applicable to cross sectional household data with the exception of the first all methods surveyed might plausibly be used to empirically detect credit rationing

comparative analysis of investment models for new york dairy farms traditional and dynamic investment models were estimated using farm level dairy data the traditional model predicted more variability in desired capital and less variability in the adjustment rate than did the dynamic model overall the traditional model performed better both models suggest a significant delay between changes in the determinants of desired capital stock and the actual investment expenditure new york dairy farmers may be making more extensive use of existing capital before making additional expenditures another explanation may be our use of farm level data where investment is periodic and discrete most other studies have used aggregate data

currency crashes in emerging markets an empirical treatment we use a panel of annual data for over 100 developing countries from 1971 through 1992 to characterize currency crashes we define a currency crash as a large change of the nominal exchange rate that is also a substantial increase in the rate of change of nominal depreciation we examine the composition of the debt as well as its level and a variety of other macroeconomic factors external and foreign crashes tend to occur when output growth is low the growth of domestic credit is high and the level of foreign interest rates are high a low ratio of fdi to debt is consistently associated with a high likelihood of a crash

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

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

fundamental q cash flow and investment evidence from farm panel data this study used a 1976 1992 panel data set to test whether farm machinery investors face finance constraints tests were based on fundamental q investment equations in which cash flow was added as an additional explanatory variable results indicated that 1 credit constraints were generally not a problem during the 1970s boom 2 credit constraints became a problem during the 1980s and early 1990s because of tighter credit and or more conservative financial managerial styles 3 the investment cash flow relationships of low debt and older operator farms were not significantly affected by farm business cycles and 4 the investment cash flow relationships of high debt and young operator farms were affected strongly by business cycles debt level was the strongest determinant of credit constraints asset size and operator age were less important

a dynamic adjustment model for u s agriculture 1948 79 abstract a multioutput model is developed within the adjustment cost framework to analyze the structure of dynamic adjustments in u s agriculture during the post war period an important feature of this model is that the econometric model is consistent with dynamic economic theory fluctuations in capital stocks variable inputs and outputs are explained by changing opportunity costs empirical results indicated that durable equipment farm produced durables and family labor exhibited significant rigidity in adjustment as a response to exogenous shocks surprisingly the hypothesis that real estate was a variable input could not be rejected the univariate flexible accelerator hypothesis which is widely maintained in most agricultural adjustment studies is inconsistent with the data

expenditure constraints and profit maximization in u s agriculture the u s agricultural sector is undergoing some of its most severe financial problems since the great depression numerous reports have emerged of large numbers of farmers being unable to obtain short term oper

the narrow moving band the dutch disease and the competitive consequences of mrs thatcher notes on trade in the presence of dynamic scale economies abstract this paper presents a model of trade in which comparative advantage instead of being determined by underlying attributes of countries evolves over time through learning by doing in this model arbitrary patterns of specialization once established tend to become entrenched over time the model sheds light on three widely held views that do not make sense in more conventional models first is the view that temporary protection of selected sectors can permanently alter the pattern of comparative advantage in the protecting country s favor second is the view that seemingly favorable developments such as the discovery of exportable natural resources may lead to a permanent loss of other sectors and reduce welfare in the long run third is the possibility that a temporary overvaluation of a currency due to tight money can lead to a permanent loss of competitiveness in some sectors

household composition labor markets and labor demand testing for separation in agricultural household models this paper tests the separation of farm labor supply and labor demand decisions using the observation that household composition is an important determinant of farm labor use with nonseparation after assessing the conditions under which the test has power against several alternatives an empirical model is developed to test the proposition that farm employment is independent of family composition the model is estimated on a data set from rural java the null hypothesis that farm labor allocation decisions are independent of household structure is not rejected the results are robust to different specifications of the labor demand function copyright 1992 by the econometric society

temporary controls on capital inflows abstract during the past decade a number of countries imposed capital controls that had two distinguishing features they were asymmetric in that they were designed principally to discourage capital inflows and they were temporary this paper studies formally the consequences of these policies calibrates their potential effectiveness and assesses their welfare implications in an environment in which the level of capital inflows can be sub optimal in addition motivated by the fact that these types of controls have often been left in place after the dissipation of the shock that lead to the controls being implemented the paper evaluates the welfare cost of procrastination in removing these types of controls

access to credit plot size and cost inefficiency among smallholder tobacco cultivators in malawi abstract using data from the malawi financial markets and household food security survey this paper examines the effect of access to credit from formal sources and tobacco plot size on cost inefficiency among malawian smallholder tobacco cultivators farm specific cost inefficiency is estimated within the framework of stochastic frontier analysis access to credit is measured as the sum of household members self reported credit limits at credit organisations arguably a truer measure of an exogenous credit constraint than credit program participation or actual loan uptake it is found that tobacco cultivation is significantly less cost inefficient per acre on larger plots while access to credit by itself has no statistically discernible effect on cost inefficiency it reduces the gain in cost efficiency from a larger plot size

targeting the real exchange rate theory and evidence abstract this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of policies aimed at setting a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate an intertemporal optimizing model suggests that in the absence of changes in fiscal policy a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate can only be attained temporarily this can be achieved by means of higher inflation and or higher real interest rates depending on the degree of capital mobility evidence for brazil chile and colombia supports the model s prediction that undervalued real exchange rates are associated with higher inflation

costly monitoring loan contracts and equilibrium credit rationing this paper develops a model with asymmetrically informed agents and costly monitoring of loan contracts where an equilibrium can exhibit credit rationing borrowers are identical ex ante but some receive loans and others do not in contrast to existing credit rationing theories rationing does not occur here due to inflexible prices adverse selection or moral hazard optimizing behaviour produces a standard debt contract in equilibrium the aggregate quantity of loans and equilibrium interest rates respond differently depending on whether there is rationing in equilibrium

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

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

estimating the structure of agricultural investment a stochastic coefficients approach two approaches a flexibie accelerator model and a stochastic coefficients alternative are used to estimate the structure of aggregate agricultural investment structural estimates of the adjustment rates for each model differ the stochastic coefficients model however performs better in out of sample forecasting

transaction costs of credit to the small scale sector in the philippines discussions on the cost of credit in less developed countries seldom include the transaction costs of lending these costs consists of the cost of administering credit and the cost of risk of default this study attempts to present estimates of these transaction costs of lending to the small scale sector by different financial institutions in the philippines recipients of the loans are subdivided by size and activity the problem of extending credit to the small scale sector is that the real cost of lending to small farmers is three times and to small scale industry is twice that of lending to large scale industry therefore lending to the smalll scale sector is feasible only under one or a combination of the following financial arrangements high interest rates cheaper funds from the central bank or cross subsidization the philippine experience shows that certain specialized lending institutions are an appropriate vehicle for extending credit to the small scale sector rural banks are a particularly good example since administrative costs are low and price or allocative efficiency is sufficiently higher than that of private development banks

the effects of capital controls on international capital flows in the presence of asymmetric information abstract this paper examines the effects of capital controls on the volume and composition of international capital flows in the presence of asymmetric information in the two period small open economy model stochastic second period output depends on the level of first period investment which cannot be verified by international investors domestic agents obtain external funding by borrowing on international capital markets and by selling equity to international investors the paper investigates the effects of various capital controls on the debt equity choice domestic investment and welfare controls on capital inflows are shown to shift the composition of flows from fixed income instruments towards equity and to reduce the overall volume of inflows

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

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

market imperfections and output loss in the presence of expenditure constraint a generalized shadow price approach in view of widespread capital market imperfections and farmers budget constraints in developing countries an indirect production function ipf is used for a study of 289 indian paddy growers the analysis generalizes the ipf to accommodate the numerous kinds of market imperfections and policy induced distortions that pervade less developed countries agriculture the presence of these distortions in an expenditure constrained situation results in a loss of output defined as the difference between maximal potential output and actual output for the sample of farmers average output loss is found to be in the range of 12

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

the effects of tax policy on investment in agriculture the effects of tax policy on agricultural investment are investigated by estimating a dynamic interrelated input demand system net investment is specified to give rise to increasing internal costs of adjustment resulting in capital inputs being quasi fixed the system of demand equations is derived by incorporating a quadratic normalized restricted cost function into a long run dynamic optimization framework copyright 1991 by mit press

net investment in farm tractors an econometric analysis a wide range of assumptions about the capital deterioration and marginal factor cost of tractors has been made in previous studies this study develops a measure of the implicit rental price of tractors which accounts for the capital structure used by farmers the capacity depreciation of tractors and income tax considerations estimates of net investment models for alternative capacity depreciation patterns are compared to those suggested by engineering considerations the results show that the frequently used geometric decay pattern does the poorest job of explaining annual real net investment in farm tractors

behavioural and material determinants of production relations in agriculture in this essay we develop a framework for analysing the major institutions governing the production and exchange of output and the primary factors of production in rural areas the analysis incorporates general considerations of risk and information constraints jointly with the principal material attributes of agriculture and of agricultural production factors the framework is used to analyse barriers to the existence of the major intertemporal and factor markets it is applied specifically to land scarce environments for which it provides an internally consistent explanation for many of the well documented institutional features of such settings in addition the analysis provides new implications for among other phenomena the inter relationships among ownership holdings operational scale family size and factor productivity for the scarcity of animal rental markets and use of animals as collateral for the renting out of land by small landowners and for the existence of plantations for certain crops

realization and accumulation in a marxian model of the circuit of capital abstract a mathematical model of marx s circuit of capital is presented whose elements the composition of capital the rate of surplus value the rate of capitalization of surplus value and production sales and financial time lags are measurable from the accounts of capitalist firms the model is solved for exponential paths a solution with a positive rate of accumulation generally exists on paths with positive rates of accumulation and positive time lags in the recommital of realized value to production an expansion of credit is required to permit the sale of commodities a model of demand pull inflation is incorporated in the framework

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

investment in u s agriculture resource adjustment problems in u s agriculture are motivated against the background of the farm problem the adjustment cost hypothesis is invoked to specify and estimate consistently a system of dynamic investment demand and output supply equations by utilizing recent advances in dynamic duality theory the investment demand equations assume the form of a multivariate flexible accelerator results indicate that labor capital services and land exhibited quasi fixity while intermediate materials were a variable factor this can be construed as a form of asset fixity within aggregate u s agriculture the univariate flexible accelerator hypothesis is rejected

capital account liberalization as a signal the authors present a model in which a government s current capital control policy signals future policies controls on capital outflows evolve in response to news on technology conditional on government attitudes toward taxation of capital when there is uncertainty over governmental types a policy of liberal capital outflows sends a favorable signal that may trigger a capital inflow this prediction is consistent with the experience of several countries that have liberalized their capital accounts copyright 1997 by american economic association

interactions between institutional and informal credit agencies in rural india in an attempt to expand rural credit and displace the village moneylender india created a system of rural cooperatives in the 1950s and expanded branch banking into rural areas in the 1970s this article examines how these measures affected the rural market it begins with the question of how large the expansion of institutional credit has been and the extent to which it has dislodged the village and nonresident moneylenders a detailed comparison of three major surveys of the indian rural credit market suggests that in various guises the moneylender is still a major source of loans the article also examines the weak evidence on intermediation between the formal and informal sectors a formal model of the interaction between the informal moneylender and institutional lender is constructed under a variety of assumptions about the exclusivity of loan contracts and the competitive structure of the informal sector the conclusions are drawn together in the form of five proposals for public policy

determinants of credit rationing a study of informal lenders and formal credit groups in madagascar abstract previous research on the determinants of credit rationing focused exclusively on the behavior of formal lenders who contract directly with an individual borrower based on survey data from madagascar this paper presents an analysis of credit rationing by informal lenders and by members of community based groups that allocate formal group loans among themselves the results show that group members are able to obtain and to use locally available information about the applicant s creditworthiness in much the same way as informal lenders do both types of lenders use the applicant s debt servicing obligations and income as the main criteria for credit rationing this paper therefore empirically confirms theoretical arguments that community based groups have an information advantage over distant formal bank agents

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

financial market efficiency in an agrarian economy microeconometric analysis of the pakistani punjab the shadow price of capital in production is a useful indicator of the efficacy of the rural financial system using data on participants and non participants in a small farm credit programme from the pakistani punjab this article estimates the shadow price of capital endogenous switching regressions techniques are employed to control for the likely heterogeneity of borrowers versus non borrowers results indicate that an individual selected at random from the population of small farmers would experience a 200 per cent rate of return on the first rupee borrowed from the small farm credit programme indicating a high shadow price of capital and a prima facie case for small farm credit programmes