The Dynamics of the Wealth of Nations: Growth, Distribution and Structural Change. Essays in Honor of Luigi Pasinetti.

• Author: Malamud, Bernard

This book honors Luigi Pasinetti on his sixtieth birthday. Over the years, his research has explored income distribution, growth, and change affected by uneven forces acting on an economy's various sectors. The present volume, edited by Mauro Baranzini and G. C. Harcourt, contains fourteen essays which review, assess, and extend six aspects of Pasinetti's work: Ricardo and classical political economy; capital theory; models of income distribution and growth; vertical integration and structural dynamics; the economics of uneven development and unstable growth; and social institutions and economic structure. The book also contains an introductory essay by the editors and a bibliography of Pasinetti's work through 1991.

Pasinetti established himself as a leading figure in neo-Ricardian and post-Keynesian economics while he was at Cambridge University from 1956 to 1976. The Cambridge of Kahn, Kaldor, Robinson, and Sraffa was "the most stimulating place I could possibly imagine for progressive thought in economic theory," Pasinetti observed, "a unique mixture of radicalism, wisdom, and social concern that was the distinct mark of Keynes' environment." His major contributions during this period include his mathematical formulation of the Ricardian system, where he relates "natural" prices to direct and indirect labor inputs; his Sraffian treatment of capital reversal and reswitching in the Cambridge controversies of the 1960s, where he challenges the marginalist foundations of neoclassical economics; and his extension of Kaldor's model of income distribution and growth, where he demonstrates the independence of the rate of profit from worker saving.

Pasinetti assumed a chair at the Catholic University of Milan in 1976. There he has focused on a model economy comprised of vertically integrated sectors, i.e., an economy without intermediate products. Final outputs are directly linked to labor inputs in this economy, giving rise to a pure labor theory of value. Non-proportional growth in sector productivities and final demands make for tensions and structural change in this system. The resulting "dynamics of the wealth of nations," the subtitle of his 1981 book on the economics of structural change, provides the title for the present volume.

Essays in Part I of this volume deal with Ricardo's theories and their influence on subsequent thought. Peter Groenewegen ("Marshall on Ricardo") criticizes Marshall's often misleading attributions to Ricardo...