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This chapter argues that the Marxian theory of exploitation underlies the concepts of surplus and deficit industries that appear in Sraffa’s (1960) Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. This is seen from archival research of the unpublished papers of Piero Sraffa housed at the Wren Library, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. There it is shown that the origin of these concepts lies in the Marxian theory of exploitation that Sraffa developed regarding the notion of the ‘pool of profits’ the Italian economist utilized over a 14-year period from 1942 to 1956. The chapter engages in an extensive textual study of the archival evidence and then presents a simple analytical model of these relations.

This paper seeks to reconcile two very different views existing in the literature concerning how exchange and demand affect the magnitude of commodity values. Traditionally, value is considered to be created in production and subsequently realized in exchange. An alternative monetary approach posits that exchange itself contributes to the determination of commodity values. Proponents of each view claim that significant parts of Marx’s theory of value are compromised if their interpretation of the role of exchange is not adopted. Drawing on the work of Rosdolsky and Roberts, I argue that it is necessary to distinguish between the effects of exchange and demand. Exchange acts to reduce concrete, private labor to abstract social labor, while demand affects the magnitude of labor considered “socially necessary” in the sense of being expended in accordance with existing social need. I identify a new category of exchange value – the market-price of production – and use it to explain how changes in demand act to redistribute value across industries by affecting the magnitude of abstract labor considered to be socially necessary. In this way the major claim of the two approaches to exchange are reconciled. The magnitude of value is fully determined in production. At the same time monetary exchange effects, or brings about, a social division of labor by reducing concrete, private labor to abstract social labor and by distributing value according to social need as expressed by effective demand.

Building on an analysis of values and prices in the context of explicitly heterogeneous concrete labors, this paper formally examines Marx’s repeated imagery of capitalist competition as a process of “sharing” among “hostile brothers,” each a “shareholder” in a “social enterprise” in which particular commodities and capitals appear as “aliquot parts of the whole.” Approaching each commodity as it appears in competition – as the product of an aliquot part of the aggregate inputs to production – allows several conclusions. First, value-price transformation is equivalent to a transformation of actual production conditions (on the basis of which the social labor contained in the commodity is its value) into socially average or aliquot part production conditions (on the basis of which the social labor contained in the commodity is its production price). Second, price formation (“gravitational” adjustment to levels expressing equivalence) is the same thing as the formation of abstract labor as the homogeneous unit of measure for the labor content of commodities. Each is an aspect of a single process that simultaneously commensurates use-values as market equivalents and commensurates concrete labors as abstract labor, so that equivalents in exchange do indeed “contain” equal amounts of abstract labor. Third, concerning commodity fetishism and the “illusions” of competition, the social content of particular magnitudes becomes visible when each is represented as a “bearer” of crucial characteristics of the aggregate that have been projected onto its parts, so that what initially appears as separate, particular and individual is simultaneously connected, general, and social.

This paper subjects to empirical testing the standard (based on the notion of vertical integration) method for the estimation of labor values and prices of production against an alternative one known as the Temporary Single-System Interpretation (TSSI), an approach that finds strong support among a new generation of researchers. Our empirical findings from the Canadian economy suggest that both methods give rise to estimates of labor values and prices of production that are surprisingly close to observed prices. Further examination however reveals that the TSSI contradicts some of the basic tenets of logical consistency of the theory that indents to vindicate. These results lend support to the standard Marxian theory, and the estimating methods associated with it constitute a fertile ground for further research.

This paper aims to address the important issue of world food pricing from a new perspective of demand, supply production and preferences.

This paper reviews the models of demand and supply and introduces the author's own modeling idea in this field of global food pricing and production.

There is no such thing as permanent food scarcity, and that food scarcity is as much an ethical problem as is artificially generated scarcity of the good things of life, the basic needs of life, on which life has a fair share. The paper goes on to explain a relational model of learning to understand complementarities between the basic needs, amongst which essentially is food as a globally provisioned social good. Also endemic in this transformation are the preferences that conscious consumers ought to have, the production that appropriate technology should bring about, and the supply as an elastic function of price in a basic‐needs regime of food production and pricing.

Further statistical data needed for estimation.

The paper explains such a relational model of ethically‐induced perspectives on food demand, supply, production and pricing. The paper then investigates how the same issues can be examined in the conventional large‐scale econometric models against the data that are available. The paper suggests revisions in such econometric models in the light of the ethically‐induced relational model for understanding the issues underlying food demand, production, supply and pricing.

Several philosophical questions in regard to the appropriateness of the conventional models that fall short of addressing such essential issues, and thus also fail to predict behavior and forecast future, are examined. Some policy, program and strategic implications of the study are pointed out in the analytical conclusion.

The paper goes on to explain a relational model of learning to understand complementarities between the basic needs, amongst which essentially is food as a globally provisioned social good. Also endemic in this transformation are the preferences that conscious consumers ought to have, the production that appropriate technology should bring about, and the supply as an elastic function of price in a basic‐needs regime of food production and pricing. The paper explains such a relational model of ethically‐induced perspectives on food demand, supply, production and pricing. The paper then investigates how the same issues can be examined in the conventional large‐scale econometric models against the data that are available.

Studies concerning Soviet taxation demonstrate a diversity of opinions on the nature of turnover taxes. Four major views on the subject have emerged: (1) turnover taxes are simply a sales (excise) tax on articles' of consumption sold to the Soviet consumer; (2) not all turnover taxes are a sales tax, some of them are a substitute for rent on production of certain industrial materials; (3) in addition to being a sales (excise) tax on consumer goods and rent on some industrial materials, there exists a third type of turnover tax which is levied on agricultural production of the peasantry; (4) turnover taxes are a portion of the surplus product produced in industry and agriculture.

This paper aims to focus on duopolistic competition under dynamic price and production postponement for two differentiable products that share common product platform at a certain degree of product commonality.

Both price and production postponement modelling are benchmarked according to their profit in order to investigate the product substitutability effect to the profit and also their appropriateness to different competition situations. In addition, dynamic property is applied to show the demand changes effect of both strategic decisions (price and production) against demand uncertainty.

The results show that the pure price postponement is appropriate to be applied into highly customized products while pure production postponement to configurable products.

Price and production postponement decisions help managers to optimize product development as well as production strategy by considering demand and supply sides.

Price and production postponements give alternative ways to managers for deciding on how to produce products as fighting product and mass customized product.

Innovative price and production postponement models are the novelty of this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to document the level of risk in the Québec egg sector (conventional and specialty eggs) and analyze the optimal choices of Québec egg producers that must allocate limited resources to production of different types of eggs.

A quadratic programming approach applied to expected mean-variance models is used to analyze the impact of risk on decision to invest when the resources must be allocated to different type of production that have different risk levels. The model is calibrated using monthly data from 2009 to 2016.

Results indicated multiple uncertainty sources (technological, cost of production, price of eggs) that vary according to the types of eggs. Given risk aversion parameters, producer would favor production modes with the lowest producers’ price variance, which correspond to free-run eggs. Results also indicated that in response to a greater intensity of risk aversion, the course of action producers may choose is to increase the relative production of free-run eggs.

The empirical limits of this research are found in the lack of quality data on producer prices and costs for specialty eggs. Future research could explore the relationship between the growing impact of egg for processing, which price is based on the US price, and its relationship with specialty eggs.

The findings of the study will be useful for policy makers and managers of eggs supply chain. This is important, given the recent announcement by Canadian’s large retailers and fast food companies to increase cage free eggs offering and, in some cases, eventually only selling these types of eggs.

This study adds to the understanding of the role of risk and uncertainty in the investment decision of egg producers and different mode of production, as well as in the development of the growing production of specialty eggs in Canada. It fills a gap in the literature regarding the impact of risk in Canadian egg production. This gap is likely explained by the perception of a lack of risk in this supply managed sector in Canada and its small size relative to other supply managed sector.

Allyn Young′s lectures, as recorded by the young Nicholas Kaldor, survey the historical roots of the subject from Aristotle through to the modern neo‐classical writers. The focus throughout is on the conditions making for economic progress, with stress on the institutional developments that extend and are extended by the size of the market. Organisational changes that promote the division of labour and specialisation within and between firms and industries, and which promote competition and mobility, are seen as the vital factors in growth. In the absence of new markets, inventions as such play only a minor role. The economic system is an inter‐related whole, or a living “organon”. It is from this perspective that micro‐economic relations are analysed, and this helps expose certain fallacies of composition associated with the marginal productivity theory of production and distribution. Factors are paid not because they are productive but because they are scarce. Likewise he shows why Marshallian supply and demand schedules, based on the “one thing at a time” approach, cannot adequately describe the dynamic growth properties of the system. Supply and demand cannot be simply integrated to arrive at a picture of the whole economy. These notes are complemented by eleven articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica which were published shortly after Young′s sudden death in 1929.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the predictability of crude oil price and shale oil production, in a bid to examine the possibility of bi-directional causality.

The study adopts a recently developed predictability model by Westerlund and Narayan (2015), which accounts for persistence, endogeneity and heteroscedasticity. It also accounts for structural breaks in the predictive models.

The empirical results show that only a unidirectional causal relationship from crude oil price to shale oil production exists. This happens as crude oil price appears to be a good predictor of shale oil production; however, shale oil production does not serve as a good predictor for crude oil price. Accounting for structural break was found to improve the predictability and forecast accuracy of the predictive model. Our result is robust to choice of crude oil price benchmarks (West Texas Intermediate, Brent, Dubai Fateh and Refiners’ Acquisition Cost) and their denominations (real or nominal).

The result implies that crude oil price must be considered when predicting shale oil production. Meanwhile, the non-significance of shale of production in crude oil price predictive model provides information to potential analyst, researchers and countries predicting crude oil price that failure to account for the effect of shale oil production would not have significant impact on the forecast accuracy of their models.

The study contributes originally to the literature on crude oil price–shale oil production in four major ways. First, it applies a recently developed predictability method by Westerlund and Narayan (2015), which is more suitable for dealing with persistence, conditional heteroscedasticity and endogeneity in the predictors. Second, it investigates existence of reverse causality between crude oil price and shale oil production. Third, it examines the variation in the response and effect of four major crude oil price benchmarks. Fourth, it considers crude oil price in both real and nominal terms.