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About a quarter of a century ago, Carlo Panico and one of the authors of this chapter published a paper on ‘Sraffa, Marshall and the problem of returns’ (EJHET 1994) in which they explored links between Sraffa’s mid-1920s critique of Marshallian economics and the analysis developed some 35 years later in Production of Commodities. The 1994 contribution focused exclusively on Sraffa’s published works since his unpublished manuscripts were not yet freely accessible. With the benefit of hindsight, it may be claimed that Sraffa was a scholar who, during his lifetime, published little but wrote a lot (Kurz, 2008). Hence, when in December 1994 Trinity College Cambridge, UK, opened the Sraffa Archive, a huge amount of hitherto unknown material became available to the scientific community. Our aim in this chapter is to reconsider some of the results achieved in the 1994 contribution in the light of the new evidence provided by Sraffa’s manuscripts. The 1994 paper investigated four issues: (i) the chronological development of Sraffa’s thought in the second half of the 1920s, (ii) the analysis of the firm in the 1920s and in 1960, (iii) the determinants of variable returns in the 1920s and in 1960 and, finally, (iv) interdependence among sectors and the assumption of given quantities. In this chapter, we focus on the last two issues since, as regards item (ii), we were not able to find elements of interest in the Sraffa Archive while Garegnani (2005) and Kurz and Salvadori (2005a) have provided a thorough scrutiny of unpublished material related to item (i).

We clarify Blaug’s thought as well as Sraffa’s though on the relationship between rational and historical reconstructions we devote a section to the analysis of some of Sraffa’s unpublished documents concerning the reconstruction of Classical economics.

Christian Bidard and Guido Erreygers (2020) published in this issue of Œconomia a sort of ecumenical reply to criticisms, which over the last two decades have been levelled at their treatment of exhaustible resources within what they consider a “classical” framework of the analysis. In a first step they restate the model they began to elaborate in 2001; the original version of the model was the object of a minisymposium in the journal Metroeconomica (2001). In a second step they then reply to...

Introduction Most of Part VII of Léon Walras’s Elements of Pure Economics ( [1871] 1954) is devoted to a critical discussion of some of the views advocated by earlier schools of economic thought. In this paper we shall scrutinize Walras’s « exposition and refutation » of the classical authors. He accuses Smith, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill of having committed « fundamental errors ». In addition, Ricardo and his followers are criticized for having failed to develop « a unified general theory t...

In the first part of our chapter we critically discuss i) Modigliani’s 1958 interpretation of Sylos Labini’s Oligopolio e Progresso Tecnico (1957), ii) the following debate concerning the Sylos Postulate −the assumption according to which “potential entrants behave as though they expected existing firms to adopt the policy most unfavourable to them, namely, the policy of maintaining output while reducing the price (or accepting reductions) to the extent required to enforce such an output policy” − and iii) the incumbent’s choice of productive capacity to install as strategic entry deterrence. In the second part of the chapter we develop a model in which, as in Dixit (1980), there are three stages: in the first stage the incumbent(s) choose(s) the productive capacity to install; in the second stage a potential entrant chooses whether to enter or not and, in the case of entry, chooses the level of its productive capacity; in the third and final stage incumbent(s) and the entrant (if any) compete on prices (a la Bertrand). In particular, we study the role of mixed strategies in equilibrium. Hopefully, our model should ‘vindicate’ Sylos Labini’s theory of oligopoly and set it free from the Procrustean bed of Cournot competition.

Il volume esamina diversi aspetti della crescita economica argomentando che i vari approcci che la letteratura ha elaborato nel corso della sua lunga storia consentono di avere una visione più articolata del fenomeno della crescita nel suo complesso.