Tag Archives: Steedman

New paper by Lucas (not that one) and Serrano. From the abstract: This paper explains the “positive profits with negative surplus-value” example of Steedman (1975) and shows that while in joint production systems individual labour values can be negative, the claim that the total labour embodied in the surplus product of the economy (surplus-value) can also be negative is based on assumptions that have no economic meaning (such as negative activity levels). The paper also provides a way to...

Last weekend, as a result of Brad DeLong's post on free trade, we had a brief Twitter exchange. He had suggested that the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) model* implies gains from trade associated to comparative advantage. He went further and suggested, after I implied that the Methuen Treaty between England and Portugal had not been favorable to the latter, that Portugal had indeed benefited greatly from free trade.It is important to note, before we get to Portugal, that the HO model, which is a...