Among other innovative and important contributions to the formation of political economy, William Petty is the originator of the concept of an economic or social surplus, a vital element in the formation of classical economics. It therefore is a natural and intriguing question, how Petty came to...

This paper provides an overview of the main currents in the development of the intellectual project inaugurated by Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. Five research programmes are detailed (together with some further extensions): the nature and significance of...

This article provides a simple formalization of income-expenditure equilibrium in accordance with the Principle of Effective Demand, but augmented to explicitly incorporate public debt. This is utilized to explore the conditions required for simultaneous achievement of full-employment growth and...

The treatment of functional income distribution in classical economics has commonly been interpreted in terms of a tripartite distinction between the roles of, and the returns to, labour, capital and land, with the classical income distribution theories explaining the determination of rates of...

This essay examines Keynes’s views on public debt, taking as its point of departure his 1943 confrontation with Abba Lerner on the issue. It also exhaustively considers the wider intellectual relationship between the two men, as well as Keynes’s other commentaries on public debt in the 1930s...

Smith’s approach to market prices is a dynamic conception of price adjustment in response to market imbalance, in terms of deviation of actual prices from normal price. Latter-day demand functions are not part of this conception. Neither are latter- day supply functions – and relations...