Purpose – This paper aims to present the salient features of Smith's argument of the falling rate of profit. This theory has usually been interpreted as a result of the intensification of competition in the markets of goods and services of the factors of production. This aspect of Adam Smith...

This paper by using the categories of productive and unproductive labor and by extending and further elaborating the data series utilized in Shaikh and Tonak (1994) reveals a sharp expansion of the unproductive activities in the U.S. economy during the period 1964-2007. The combination of...

Classical economists - mainly Smith, Ricardo and J.S. Mill - abhorred public debts because of their interference with capital accumulation. J.S. Mill in particular envisaged that a rising public debt leads to higher interest rates and falling real wages, a combination which may be consistent...

This paper argues that Keynes’s analysis of the marginal efficiency of capital is consistent with the principle of effective demand and is, in this sense, characteristically different from the related classical or neoclassical conceptualisations. Furthermore, the notion of the marginal...

The focus of this paper is on the evolution of the major macroeconomic variables of classical political economy and the contrast with their orthodox counterparts in the quest to identify the causes of the current crisis in the Greek economy. Our analysis shows that declining profitability past a...

Classical economists mainly Smith, Ricardo and J.S. Mill abhorred public debts because of their interference with capital accumulation. J.S. Mill in particular envisaged that a rising public debt leads to higher interest rates and falling real wages, a combination which may be consistent with a...

Abstract This paper begins with a critical presentation of Kondratiev’s (1926) seminal paper on the question of the existence as well as his theoretical explanation of long cyclical fluctuations of the level of economic activity. Furthermore we argue that a coherent explanation of long-run...