The Measurement of Labour Content: A General Approach

This paper analyses the theoretical issues related to the measurement of labour content in the context of general technologies with heterogeneous labour. A novel axiomatic framework is used in order to formulate the key properties of the notion of labour content and analyse its theoretical foundations. Then, a simple measure of labour content is uniquely characterised, which is consistent with common practice in input-output analysis and with a number of recent approaches in value theory.