Essays on the Prelude to the Critique of Economic Theory
type: CreativeWork
description: This PhD thesis consists of four chapters on different topics in economic theory and empirical applications. The research questions in the first three chapters are principally based on the works of Piero Sraffa. The first chapter discusses the distinction between basic and non-basic commodities in Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Sraffa, 1960) and finds that once the distribution of the whole surplus (which includes basic and non-basic goods) is treated as in Zambelli (2018), the computation of self-replacing prices and the profit rates can be made by considering the whole production system (i.e., in terms of the distribution of a surplus which is made of both basics and non-basics) and not only the basic industries. Therefore, the methodology in Zambelli (2018) enables the computation of all the self-replacing prices and profit rates as a function of the wage rate measured in terms of the whole surplus and not only as a function of the surplus of the basic system. The second chapter aims at reconstructing Piero Sraffa's monetary theory through an analysis of Sraffa's published and unpublished works. A coherent approach to monetary theory emerges, according to which money is inherently non-neutral with respect to economic outcomes, due to the institutional forces establishing the monetary standard of deferred payments. Moreover, it is shown that Sraffa was able to anticipate monetary problems that would have been discussed only several decades later in the economic literature. The third chapter investigates the conditions under which Sraffian schemes can be reduced to a special case of the Walrasian general equilibrium model, as argued by Hahn (1982). By devising a thought experiment, a neoclassical model and a Sraffian model are compared and analyzed from the perspective of Computable Economics. It is found that arguments based on the flexibility of production coefficients, the uniformity of profit rates across sectors, intertempora…
abstract: This PhD thesis consists of four chapters on different topics in economic theory and empirical applications. The research questions in the first three chapters are principally based on the works of Piero Sraffa. The first chapter discusses the distinction between basic and non-basic commodities in Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (Sraffa, 1960) and finds that once the distribution of the whole surplus (which includes basic and non-basic goods) is treated as in Zambelli (2018), the computation of self-replacing prices and the profit rates can be made by considering the whole production system (i.e., in terms of the distribution of a surplus which is made of both basics and non-basics) and not only the basic industries. Therefore, the methodology in Zambelli (2018) enables the computation of all the self-replacing prices and profit rates as a function of the wage rate measured in terms of the whole surplus and not only as a function of the surplus of the basic system. The second chapter aims at reconstructing Piero Sraffa's monetary theory through an analysis of Sraffa's published and unpublished works. A coherent approach to monetary theory emerges, according to which money is inherently non-neutral with respect to economic outcomes, due to the institutional forces establishing the monetary standard of deferred payments. Moreover, it is shown that Sraffa was able to anticipate monetary problems that would have been discussed only several decades later in the economic literature. The third chapter investigates the conditions under which Sraffian schemes can be reduced to a special case of the Walrasian general equilibrium model, as argued by Hahn (1982). By devising a thought experiment, a neoclassical model and a Sraffian model are compared and analyzed from the perspective of Computable Economics. It is found that arguments based on the flexibility of production coefficients, the uniformity of profit rates across sectors, intertempora…
author: Bracci, Giacomo
language: ita
date published: 2023-05-19
date modified: 2026-07-24T05:04:35Z
provider: Università degli Studi di Trento
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Università degli studi di Trento

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: https://hdl.handle.net/11572/377247

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.15168/11572_377247