期刊名称：Discussion Papers in Economics / Manchester Metropolitan University
出版年度：2007
卷号：2007
出版社：Manchester Metropolitan University
摘要：It will perhaps be helpful to emphasize at once that the reference to ‘industries’ in our title is to be taken literally. We shall be concerned throughout with capital-output ratios at the direct, industry level and not at either the vertically-integrated sectoral level or the economy level. Much Sraffian writing has, of course, centred on these latter levels – and for perfectly respectable reasons. Yet there is good reason also to focus attention explicitly on what takes place at the level of the industry, not least because that is the level of analysis at which so much microeconomic theory is presented. Moreover, most applied microeconomists are interested in specific industries and it is relationships at this level that interest them. Arguments about economy-level income distribution and aggregate ratios are of little concern to them – and this lack of concern is not going to be overcome by the fact that careful Sraffian authors writing on aggregated relationships sometimes slip in a parenthetical warning that the issues involved are not essentially macro in nature. If we are to capture the interest and the imagination of most microeconomists, then, we must present Sraffian arguments at the level of specific industries. (And this is easy to do even in simple diagrammatic terms; one need only extend the familiar wage-interest rate frontier ‘back’ to
r = - 1 in order to read off from the diagram the industry level employment per unit of output and capital-output ratio. These magnitudes can behave ‘unconventionally’ even when there is no reswitching for w > 0 < r.)
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