Against the Stream: Ajit Singh and His Battles

This book pays homage to Ajit Singh, economist and intellectual fighter for many causes. It does so through intertwined narratives including, among the major strands, Singh’s life and works, the Faculty of Economics and Politics in Cambridge, and the Punjab and Sikhism — all of which the author manages to weave together with rich prose, fine scholarship and passionate commitment to the subject

Pasinetti's 'Structural Change and Economic Growth': A Conceptual Excursus

A clear and organic exposition of Pasinetti's theoretical framework of Structural Change and Economic Growth has been prevented by misunderstandings and ambiguities concerning basic categories and terminology. The pre-institutional character of the approach, the nature of its equilibrium paths and the significance - and normative character - of the 'natural' economic system are some of the most controversial issues. The aim of this article is to present a conceptual excursus of the model to establish a solid foundation for fruitful discussions to be held with other Classical approaches

Capital Theory: paradoxes

The idea that capital theory might lead economists to discover forms of \u2018paradoxical\u2019 behaviour has emerged in the economic literature of the 1960s largely as an outcome of developments in the field of production theory (linear production models leading to enquiries into discrete and discontinuous relations). What happened in capital theory is in fact a special instance of a more general phenomenon. Economists sometimes tend to examine a large domain of economic phenomena by adapting theoretical concepts that had originally been devised for a much narrower range of special issues. The discoveries of \u2018paradoxical\u2019 relations derive from the fact that their process of generalization often turns out to be ill-conceived and misleading, if not entirely unwarranted. For a long time, in capital theory, it had been taken for granted that there is a unique, unambiguous profitability ranking of production techniques in terms of capital intensity, along the scale of variation of the rate of interest. The discovery that this is not necessarily true has induced many economists to speak of \u2018paradoxes\u2019 in the theory of capital. But the roots of apparently paradoxical behaviour are to be found, not in the economic phenomena themselves, but in the economists' tendency to rely on too simple \u2018parables\u2019 of economic behaviour. The paper examines the emergence of the aggregate view, and its criticism during the capital controversy debate. It also considers the aftermath of capital controversies and their influence on contemporary economic research. An importance consequence is that the conception of \u2018capital\u2019 has had to be jettisoned, which has stimulated reformulations of the pure theory of capital. There has been on the one hand a return to the Walrasian general equilibrium theory in its inter-temporal formulation, and on the other hand a remarkable revival of classical political economy. The controversy had also a number of less striking but perhaps longer term consequences. The consideration of paradoxes has alerted economists to the richness and complexity of economic relationships, and to the need to avoid a process of generalization from the consideration of special cases. In any case the debate seems to have compelled theoretical economists to be more rigorous about the nature and limits of their assumptions. In many important cases, it has also brought about a change in the main focus of their analysis