Income distribution and the balance of payments: a formal reconstruction of some Argentinian structuralist contributions

A two part paper by Ariel Dvoskin and Germán David Feldman. From the abstract:

In this two-part paper, we explore the interaction between income distribution and the balance of payments, by assessing the contributions of three Argentinian exponents of the Latin American Structuralist School: Oscar Braun, Marcelo Diamand and Adolfo Canitrot. With this aim, we introduce a two-sector model inspired by the classical tradition. Part I of the article examines the implications for prices and quantities of the phenomenon of ‘technical dependency’. That is, the inelastic demand for imported inputs observed in peripheral economies, a true constraint to growth during the Bretton Woods era. We leave until Part II of the paper the assessment of the implications of ‘financial dependency’, namely the influence exerted on the profit rate of peripheral economies by the international profit rate.

Links here and here.

Dvoskin and Petri on the relevance of the capital debates

Ariel Dvoskin and Fabio Petri just got their paper published in Metroeconomica. From the abstract:

Among the recent interventions in the capital controversy, the debate between Paola Potestio and Kurz & Salvadori has raised important issues. We agree with Potestio's rejection of the legitimacy of a value endowment of capital but we disagree with her dismissal of the relevance of reswitching and reverse capital deepening: these phenomena are very important because they undermine the demand-side role of the conception of capital as a single factor. For the marginal approach to be plausible, this demand-side role had to imply the stability of the savings-investment market even in shorter time frames than those required by a complete adaptation of the ‘form’ of capital; this was taken by Marshall to authorize doing without a given endowment of value capital, which opened the door to the shift to the modern neo-Walrasian versions of the marginal approach. With proof from Hayek, Hicks, Malinvaud, and Lucas we argue that a continuing belief in traditional time-consuming marginalist disequilibrium adjustments based on capital-labour substitution is the hidden reason why the claim often made by contemporary marginalist economists, that the economy can be assumed to be all the time on the equilibrium-growth path, is not found patently unacceptable. The true microfoundation of DSGE macromodels is not intertemporal equilibrium theory, but the time-consuming adjustment mechanisms on whose basis the marginal approach was born and accepted, and on whose basis monetarism was then able to re-assert a pre-Keynesian view of the working of the economy.

You can read the preliminary version at the Siena working paper series here. The idea that the capital debates is a central issue in macroeconomics has been discussed recurrently in this blog.

Ariel Dvoskin on the limits of Walrasian equilibrium

Here is Ariel's PhD dissertation, which is well worth reading for those interested in the evolution and limitations of the marginalist (neoclassical) models. From the abstract:

"The marginalist approach is unable to satisfactorily incorporate capital goods within the supply and demand explanation of prices and distribution, and this seems to have condemned modern general equilibrium theory to face an unpleasant dilemma: either this theory is, like Hahn, truly consistent with its own theoretical object, a notion of equilibrium that must be silent on the issue of how actual economies work; or, alternatively, the theory attempts to provide some explanation of the working of actual economies and in so doing, it must inescapably rely on traditional gravitational ways of reasoning that must presume the illegitimate notion of capital in value terms. Either way modern general equilibrium theory runs into a blind alley, with the implication that, to predict with reasonable accuracy price, quantity and distributional trends as observed in actual economies, an explanation with different theoretical foundations is necessarily called for."