International Conference Sraffa´s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities´1960-2010

Posteamos algunos videos de la Conferencia Internacional a los 50 años de la publicación de Producción de Mercancías por medio de Mercancías.

1 Garegnani: On the Present State of the Capital Controversy

2 Fabio Petri: Bringing sense back to the theory of aggregate investment

3 Franklin Serrano: Elements of continuity and change in the international economic order: an analysis based on the modern classical surplus approach

4 Gary Mongiovi: On the Concept of Exploitation in Marxian Economics

5 Heinz Kurz:Reviving the "Standpoint of the Old Classical Economists": Piero Sraffa's Contribution to Political Economy

6 Tony Aspromourgos: Sraffa's System in relation to some main currents in unorthodox economics

7 Marc Lavoie: Should Sraffian economics be dropped out of the post-Keynesian school?

8 Roberto Ciccone: Public debt and the determination of output

9  Antonella Palumbo:Potential output, actual output and demand-led growth.

10  Closure of the international conference by professor Heinz Kurz

 

Libros de la Conferencia.

Sraffa and the Reconstruction of Economic Theory

Theories of Value and Distribution

Edited By Enrico Sergio Levrero, Antonella Palumbo and Antonella Stirati

 

Written on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, the papers selected and contained in this book account for the work completed around the two central aspects of his contribution to economic analysis, namely the criticism of the neoclassical (or 'marginalist') theory of value and distribution, and the reconstruction of economic theory along the lines of the Classical approach. Divided into three volumes, the book debates the most fruitful routes for advancements in this field and their implications for applied and policy analysis.

This first volume focuses on the critique of general equilibrium theory and the determinants of income distribution, together with the related issue of the different methods of analysis which characterise the Classical theory and the marginalist approach.

About the Author(s)

By Enrico Sergio Levrero, Antonella Palumbo and Antonella Stirati

Enrico Sergio Levrero is Associate Professor at Roma Tre University, Italy. His main research interests are in the theories of value and distribution, wages and the labour market, issues of monetary economics and Sraffa's works. His previous works include Four Lectures on Wages and the Labour Market (2012) and he has published several articles in academic journals and collective volumes. 

 

Antonella Palumbo is Associate Professor of economics at Roma Tre University, Italy. Her main research interests and activities are in the modern revival of Classical economics and in the theories of demand-led growth. She has published several articles in academic journals and collective volumes.

Antonella Stirati is currently a Professor at Roma Tre University, Italy. Her main scientific interest is in the revival of the surplus approach, particularly in the areas of income distribution and employment theory. She has published the Theory of Wages in Classical Economics (Elgar, 1994) and several articles in academic journals and collective volumes.

Table of Contents Book I

PART I: THE CAPITAL CONTROVERSY AND GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM ANALYSIS
1. On the Present State of the Capital Controversy; Pierangelo Garegnani
2. Two Strands of Thought in Pierangelo Garegnani's Capital Theory Critique; Harvey Gram
3. Only a Few Techniques Matter! On the Number of Curves on the Wage Frontier; Bertram Schefold
4. On the Stability of the Ramsey Accumulation Path; Enrico Bellino
5. Malinvaud on Wicksell's Legacy to Capital Theory: Some Critical Remarks; Saverio M. Fratini
6. Capital and Stationary States; Paolo Trabucchi

PART II: THE REVIVAL AND DEVELOPMENT OF THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF DISTRIBUTION
7.Marx's theory of wages and the revival of the Surplus Approach; Enrico Sergio Levrero
8. On Advanced Capitalism and the Determinants of the Change in Income Distribution: A Classical Interpretation; Massimo Pivetti
9. Alternative 'Closures' to Sraffa's System: Some Reflections in the Light of the Changes in Income Distribution in the Last Decades; Antonella Stirati 
10. Sraffa and Keynes: Two Ways of Making a 'Revolution' in Economic Theory; Guglielmo Chiodi and Leonardo Ditta
11. Causality and Structure in Piecemeal Macroeconomic Modelling; Sergio Parrinello
12. On the Link Between Functional and Personal Distribution in Italy; Aldo Barba
13. Exchange Rate Policy, Distributive Conflict and Structural Heterogeneity. The Argentinian and Brazilian Cases; Alejandro Fiorito and Fabian Amico

Table of Contents Book II

By Enrico Sergio Levrero, Antonella Palumbo and Antonella Stirati

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Table of Contents Book III

By Enrico Sergio Levrero, Antonella Palumbo and Antonella Stirati

PART I
1. Piero Sraffa and the Future of Economics – A Personal Evaluation; Luigi Pasinetti
2. Disequilibrium and Reproduction Prices: Some Extensions of Sraffa's Model; Carlo Benetti, Christian Bidard and Edith Klimovsky
3. Sraffa's System in Relation to Some Main Currents in Unorthodox Economics; Tony Aspromourgos
4. Sraffians, Other Post-Keynesians, and the Controversy Over Centres of Gravitation; Marc Lavoie
5. Sraffa, Sen and Non-causal Representations in Social Analysis; Andrea Ginzburg
6. Piero Sraffa and Shackle's Years of High Theory – Sraffa's Significance in the History of Economic Theories; Heinrich Bortis

PART II: THE EVOLUTION OF SRAFFA'S IDEAS AND THE MANUSCRIPTS
7. On Sraffa's and Wittgenstein Methodological Similarities: from the Rejection of Inadequate Types of Causality to the Comparison of Different 'forms of life'; Richard Arena
8. Sraffa's Lectures on Continental Banking; Marcello de Cecco
9. The Construction of Long Period Supply Curves: Notes on Sraffa's Criticism to the Analyses of Partial Equilibrium; Giuseppe Freni and Neri Salvadori
10. A Pictorial Approach to the Standard Commodity with a Digression; Giorgio Gilibert
11. On Sraffa's Corrected Organic Composition of Capital; Scott Carter

PART III: SRAFFA'S LEGACY AND THE INTERPRETATION OF RICARDO
12. Rent, as a Share of Produce, Not Governed by Proportions; Christian Gherke
13. Ricardo's Writings in Russia: Influence and Interpretations; Gennady Borgomazov and Denis Melnik

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Heinz Kurz: Pierangelo Garegnani Obituary (1930-2011)

Por Heinz D. Kurz

From the obituary:

"Pierangelo Garegnani was a major economic theorist and historian of economic analysis. To him economic theory and its history were but two sides of a single coin. He was possessed of great intellectual power and an uncompromising dedication to his work, which in the tradition of Piero Sraffa propelled the revival and further elaboration of classical political economy. As a person he was not always easy to deal with – the solemnity of purpose, as he saw it, could overshadow his behaviour. He was one of the deepest thinkers I encountered. His work can be expected to have a lasting impact on the economics profession".

 "Garegnani provided compelling support of Sraffa’s interpretation that the classical economists from Adam Smith to Ricardo and then Marx had determined the general rate of profits and relative prices in terms of the following ‘intermediate’ data (i.e. data in the theory of value and distribution, but variables in other parts of the theory): (a) the gross output levels of the various commodities, (b) the real wage rate(s) or the share of wages in national income and (c) the technical conditions of production actually in place (Garegnani 1981, 1984, 1987). Most important, in the classical economists the distributive variables, the rate of profits and wages, were not explained in terms of the marginal productivities of capital and labour". ...

  

"In accordance with Sraffa, Garegnani (1981, 1984 and elsewhere) insisted that the classical surplus-based approach does not stand or fall with the labour theory of value. Therefore it did not come as a surprise that Garegnani got involved in debates with some Marxists, who contend that the labour theory of value is indispensable in demonstrating the ‘exploitative’ nature of profits. According to Garegnani this involves a misunderstanding. Already the fact that workers do not get the whole net product could be read in this way. More important, when Marx was writing, that is, before marginal productivity theory began to filter into the academic and public discourse, one might still have been content with the observation that positive profits presuppose a positive surplus value (or surplus labour). But once marginalist theorists had argued that profits do not express exploitation but rather the productivity enhancing effect of the employment of capital, an entirely new situation emerged. What if marginal productvity theory happened to be correct? As Samuelson’s surrogate production function shows, marginal productivity theory and the labour theory of value are not incompatible with one another.(1) 

 "The Irony of it is, that if the “Labour Theory of Value”applied exactly throughout, then, and only then, would the “marginal product of capital” theory work!"  

"It is ironic to see that the classical approach, coherently developed, actually undermines Say’s law – the law for which Keynes had thought he could put classical analysis to one side. If we cannot rely upon the conventional principle of substitution in production according to which the demand for an input (e.g. labour) per unit of output can be expected to increase as the price (the wage rate) of the input falls, then there is no reason to presume that the economy will bring about a tendency towards the full employment of all productive ressources. This result does not depend on the (downward) stickiness of prices. Even if prices are flexible, a fall in the real wage rate need not lead to rising levels of employment, as conventional economic theory predicts. Garegnani praised Keynes for having established the principle of effective demand, that is, there is no presumption that aggregate investment will oscillate around full employment savings"...

"However, he was critical of Keynes for having retained important elements of the marginalist doctrine and especially the concept of the ‘marginal efficiency of capital’, which was but the orthodox investment function in new garb. Yet the concept could not be sustained, because it was based on the untenable marginalist principle of substitution between factors of production"...

"With the analysis not constrained by the straightjacket of the full employment assumption, one does not encounter in classical economics such concepts as Pareto optimality: a system which, in normal conditions, exhibits smaller or larger margins of unused productive capacity and work force is subject to different laws than a system characterized by full employment and full capacity utilization. In conditions of idle productive capacity the usual marginalist reasoning does not apply. In the marginalist world aggregate effective demand, by definition, has no impact on actual output as a whole and its growth over time, whereas in the world of the revived classical economics it has. According to Garegnani the principle of effective demand matters, in the long run no less than in the short run. While in the short run it is reflected in higher or lower degrees of capacity utilization and employment, in the long run it is reflected in a larger or smaller growth rate of productive capacity".

Read  the rest  HERE

After the Crisis is Before the Crisis

Profesor Heinz D. Kurz.

Profesor Titular de Economía, Universidad de Graz, Alemania.

Departamento de Economía de la Universidad de University of Graz,

Director del Centro Schumpeter Graz (GSC). 

Del Lunes 7 al viernes 11 de noviembre se realizó en México, organizado por en la Facultad de Economía-UNAM, en la Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana- UAM-Xochimilco y El Colegio de México, el Congreso Internacional: Crisis de la Teoría Económica y Políticas Alternativas ante la Crisis Global con la participación de Mássimo Pivetti (Italia), Alejandro Fiorito (Argentina), Gary Mongiovi (EEUU), Heinz Kurz (Austria), Aldo Barba (Italia), Amit Bahduri (India), Franklin Serrano (Brasil) y Eladio Febrero (España). Toda la actividad fue coordinada por el Profesor Alfonso Vadillo Bello.


Presentaremos aqui la  Conferencia del Profesor Heinz Kurz  y su abstract. 




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Abstract

Viewpoints of Schumpeter, Keynes and Sraffa

The paper discusses alternative and compelementary views as regards the Instability of Capitalism. First, the classical and the marginalist approach to the theory of value and distribution and to output as a whole will be counterposed and a summary account of Sraffa's main criticisms of the marginalist theory provided. The route by which Sraffa arrived at his results, which sheds additional light on his critical task, will be sketched briefly, using Sraffa’s unpublished work. Obviously, only a small part of his respective work can be surveyed. Then the implications of these criticisms with regard to his view of the working of the economic system will be drawn out. The emphasis is on the determination of output as whole and employment. According to Sraffa the capitalist economy is not the crisis-free system possessed of an endogenous mechanism of self-regulation as it is described by marginalist theory. Then Sraffa's approach is compared to that of Keynes in the /General Theory/, on the one hand, and Schumpeter in the /Theory of Economic Development/, on the other. It is argued that all three authors rejected Say's law, the marginalist idea of undiluted consumer sovereignty, the idea that savings determine investment, the concept of a dichotomy between the real and the monetary sphere and the concept that capitalist economic systems could develop smoothly. As Schumpeter put it in one of his writings: "Cycles are not, like tonsils, separable things that might be treated by themselves, but are, like the beat of the heart, of the essence of the organism that displays them." The paper concludes with some critical remarks on the so-called "New Classical Economics", championed by Robert Lucas and other Chicago economists.

Closure of the international conference by professor Heinz Kurz

International Conference
Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities 1960-2010.
2nd-4th December 2010, Roma Tre University, Faculty of Economics

Heinz Kurz:Reviving the "Standpoint of the Old Classical Economists": Piero Sraffa's Contribution to Political Economy

International Conference
Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities 1960-2010.
2nd-4th December 2010, Roma Tre University, Faculty of Economics





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Abstract

El documento analiza los comienzos del trabajo crítico y constructivo de Sraffa en los finales de 1920 y principios de 1930 y su continuación en la década de 1940.