Description
Book SynopsisIn this important and original book, Professor Sylos Labini offers an analysis of growth that is at once theoretical, historical and statistical. The central aim of neoclassical economics has been to discover the equilibrium values of prices, incomes, employment and production.
Economic Growth and Business Cycles, by contrast, seeks to understand the logic behind the movement of these quantities over time.
Drawing upon a tradition in economics which dates from Adam Smith, while making use of modern analytical techniques, Sylos Labini views the process of growth as central to economic theory. Economic growth is seen not as a systematic increase of output conceived as an homogeneous aggregate, but rather as a process of structural change, affecting the composition of employment and bringing about changes in market forms, output, income distribution and the system of prices.
Economic Growth and Business Cycles will be welcomed by students and teachers of economics who wish to become acquainted with an original approach to the process of growth.
Table of ContentsSraffa's critique of the Marshallian theory of prices; the great debates on the laws of returns and the value of capital - when will economists finally accept their own logic?; long-run changes in the wage and price mechanisms and the process of growth; the general theory - critical reflections suggested by some important problems of our time; new aspects of the cyclical development of the economy; the changing character of the so-called business cycle; oligopoly - static and dynamic analysis; the theory of unemployment, too, is historically conditioned; technical progress, unemployment, and economic dynamics; "capitalism, socialism and democracy" and large-scale firms.
