Search results for " laws of returns"

Methodological basis and the cogency of criticism: the cases of Clapham (1922) and Sraffa (1926)

1998

“Piero Sraffa: economic reality, the economist and economic theory. An interpretation”.

2007

We carry out a textual analysis of Sraffa's main published contributions to pure economics in order to elaborate a rational reconstruction of an aspect of Sraffa's implicit methodology which has not yet been duly investigated. We refer to the threefold relationship between ‘economic reality’, ‘the economist/observer’ and ‘economic theory’. We elucidate the constraints which, for Sraffa, should bind the economists' arbitrariness and we trace the elements of continuity and evolution from the 1925–6 critique of Marshallian economics to Production of Commodities.

Method and analysis in Piero Sraffa's 1925 critique of Marshallian economics

2000

This paper provides an analysis of the logical structure and analytical content of Piero Sraffa's 1925 Italian paper, ‘Sulle relazioni fra costo e quantita prodotta’. It shows that Sraffa's criticism of the supply side of Marshall's theory of value in a competitive partial equilibrium model involves analytical and methodological issues. Endorsing an agressive methodology Sraffa logically reconstructs Marshall's model on variable returns to determine its empirical domain. He demonstrates that the latter encompasses only the empirically irrelevant cases of specific factor industries and specific external economies industries and that it cannot be generalized to non-specific factor industries …