This paper reconsiders the anteriority of Torrens’ theory of natural wage to that of Ricardo. Ricardo was influenced by Torrens’ thinking when writing the chapter on ‘Wages’ of the Principles. For many historians of economic thought, this influence is limited to Torrens’ focus on the...

This paper proposes a reconstruction of one of Torrens little unknown piece of work on the making and the distribution of income among the social classes. The framework assumes a single-good economy with fixed production coefficients. It differs from the contemporary Ricardo theory (that...

The Ricardian dynamics describe the substitution of a new marginal method for an outgoing marginal method when demand increases. The process of extension or intensi…cation of cultivation allows for spasmodic changes in prices and rents but is smooth on the physical side. We criticize the notion...

We study the economic mechanism which sustains the substitution of a marginal method for another when demand increases, in the presence of scarce resources. In those Ricardian dynamics, it is shown that the outgoing method is determined by the quantity side of the problem, the incoming method by...

The Ricardian dynamics study the evolution of distribution when demand increases. The successive marginal methods in agriculture are determined by means of a rule which has never been stated explicitly by Ricardo's commentators. But the rule also allows us to point at two limits of Ricardo's...

The parametric Lemke algorithm finds an odd number of solutions to the linear complementarity problem LCP (q, M), for a matrix M with zero blocks on the diagonal and vector q within a certain domain. A criterion for monotonicity and uniqueness is given. The algorithm applies to the determination...

In order to extend the theory of value and the trade-off property to economic systems with lands, Ricardo reduced their study to that of productive systems without lands by considering the marginal agricultural methods. Sraffa generalised the analysis to prices of production and rejected the...

We propose to re-read Ricardo's theory of rent and its modern versions. Ricardo's dynamic approach follows the transformations of a long-term equilibrium with demand. Sraffa adopted the same framework while substituting a value criterion for a physical criterion to determine the incoming...

An increase in the demand for agricultural goods leads to the use of more intensive cultivation methods. Though Ricardo sees no difficulties in the intensification process, their existence is revealed by the possible occurrence of multiple equilibria. A general theory of intensive rent is based...

From 1759 to 1762, François Quesnay had systematically appealed to an obscure physiocrat, Charles Richard de Butré, when he had to make a numerical estimate or to do a nonelementary computation. In the present article, we use two important unpublished writings by Butré to discuss and assess...