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Verdoorn's law is named after Dutch economist Petrus Johannes Verdoorn. [1] [2] [3] It states that in the long run productivity generally grows proportionally to the square root of output. In economics, this law pertains to the relationship between the growth of output and the growth of productivity. According to the law, faster growth in output increases productivity due to increasing returns. Verdoorn argued [4] that "in the long run a change in the volume of production, say about 10 per cent, tends to be associated with an average increase in labor productivity of 4.5 per cent." The Verdoorn coefficient close to 0.5 (0.484) is also found in subsequent estimations of the law. [5]
Verdoorn's law describes a simple long-run relation between productivity and output growth, whose coefficients were empirically estimated in 1949 by the Dutch economist. The relation takes the following form:
where p is the labor productivity growth, Q the output growth (value-added), b is the Verdoorn coefficient and a is the exogenous productivity growth rate. [6]
Verdoorn's law differs from "the usual hypothesis […] that the growth of productivity is mainly to be explained by the progress of knowledge in science and technology", [7] as it typically is in neoclassical models of growth (notably the Solow model). Verdoorn's law is usually associated with cumulative causation models of growth, in which demand rather than supply determine the pace of accumulation.
Nicholas Kaldor and Anthony Thirlwall developed models of export-led growth based on Verdoorn's law. For a given country an expansion of the export sector may cause specialisation in the production of export products, which increase the productivity level, and increase the level of skills in the export sector. This may then lead to a reallocation of resources from the less efficient non-trade sector to the more productive export sector, lower prices for traded goods and higher competitiveness. This productivity change may then lead expanded exports and to output growth.
Thirlwall shows [8] that for several countries the rate of growth never exceeds the ratio of the rate of growth of exports to income elasticity of demand for imports. This implies that growth is limited by the balance of payments equilibrium. This result is known as Thirlwall's Law.
Sometimes Verdoorn's law is called Kaldor-Verdoorn's law or effect.
In microeconomics, economies of scale are the cost advantages that enterprises obtain due to their scale of operation, and are typically measured by the amount of output produced per unit of time. A decrease in cost per unit of output enables an increase in scale that is, increased production with lowered cost. At the basis of economies of scale, there may be technical, statistical, organizational or related factors to the degree of market control.
Macroeconomics is a branch of economics that deals with the performance, structure, behavior, and decision-making of an economy as a whole. This includes national, regional, and global economies. Macroeconomists study topics such as output/GDP and national income, unemployment, price indices and inflation, consumption, saving, investment, energy, international trade, and international finance.
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
Nicholas Kaldor, Baron Kaldor, born Káldor Miklós, was a Hungarian economist. He developed the "compensation" criteria called Kaldor–Hicks efficiency for welfare comparisons (1939), derived the cobweb model, and argued for certain regularities observable in economic growth, which are called Kaldor's growth laws. Kaldor worked alongside Gunnar Myrdal to develop the key concept Circular Cumulative Causation, a multicausal approach where the core variables and their linkages are delineated.
Tobin's q, is the ratio between a physical asset's market value and its replacement value. It was first introduced by Nicholas Kaldor in 1966 in his paper: Marginal Productivity and the Macro-Economic Theories of Distribution: Comment on Samuelson and Modigliani. It was popularised a decade later by James Tobin, who in 1970, described its two quantities as:
One, the numerator, is the market valuation: the going price in the market for exchanging existing assets. The other, the denominator, is the replacement or reproduction cost: the price in the market for newly produced commodities. We believe that this ratio has considerable macroeconomic significance and usefulness, as the nexus between financial markets and markets for goods and services.
The Dual Sector model, or the Lewis model, is a model in developmental economics that explains the growth of a developing economy in terms of a labour transition between two sectors, the subsistence or traditional agricultural sector and the capitalist or modern industrial sector.
In economics, the Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth. In turn, these sectors of the economy become more expensive over time, because their input costs have increased while productivity has not. Typically, this affects services more than manufactured goods, and in particular health, education, arts and culture.
The technical progress function is a concept developed by Nicholas Kaldor to explain the rate of growth of labour productivity, as a measure of technical progress.
Kaldor's growth laws are a series of three laws relating to the causation of economic growth.
Demand-led growth is the foundation of an economic theory claiming that an increase in aggregate demand will ultimately cause an increase in total output in the long run. This is based on a hypothetical sequence of events where an increase in demand will, in effect, stimulate an increase in supply. This stands in opposition to the common neo-classical theory that demand follows supply, and consequently, that supply determines growth in the long run.
Luigi L. Pasinetti was an Italian economist of the post-Keynesian school. Pasinetti was considered the heir of the "Cambridge Keynesians" and a student of Piero Sraffa and Richard Kahn. Along with them, as well as Joan Robinson, he was one of the prominent members on the "Cambridge, UK" side of the Cambridge capital controversy. His contributions to economics include developing the analytical foundations of neo-Ricardian economics, including the theory of value and distribution, as well as work in the line of Kaldorian theory of growth and income distribution. He also developed the theory of structural change and economic growth, structural economic dynamics and uneven sectoral development.
Anthony Philip Thirlwall was a British economist who was Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Kent. He made major contributions to regional economics; the analysis of unemployment and inflation; balance of payments theory, and to growth and development economics with particular reference to developing countries. He was the author of the bestselling textbook Economics of Development: Theory and Evidence now in its ninth edition. He was also the biographer and literary executor of the famous Cambridge economist Nicholas Kaldor. Perhaps his most notable contribution was to show that if long-run balance of payments equilibrium is a requirement for a country, its growth of national income can be approximated by the ratio of the growth of exports to the income elasticity of demand for imports.
Robert Rowthorn FAcSS FLSW is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge and has been elected as a Life Fellow of King’s College. He is also a senior research fellow of the Centre for Population Research at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford.
Thirlwall's law states that if long-run balance of payments equilibrium on current account is a requirement, and the real exchange rate stays relatively constant, then the long run growth of a country can be approximated by the ratio of the growth of exports to the income elasticity of demand for imports.
In the technological theory of social production, the growth of output, measured in money units, is related to achievements in technological consumption of labour and energy. This theory is based on concepts of classical political economy and neo-classical economics and appears to be a generalisation of the known economic models, such as the neo-classical model of economic growth and input-output model.
Nicholas Kaldor in his essay titled A Model of Economic Growth, originally published in Economic Journal in 1957, postulates a growth model, which follows the Harrodian dynamic approach and the Keynesian techniques of analysis. In his growth model, Kaldor attempts “to provide a framework for relating the genesis of technical progress to capital accumulation”, whereas the other neoclassical models treat the causation of technical progress as completely exogenous.
The Fei–Ranis model of economic growth is a dualism model in developmental economics or welfare economics that has been developed by John C. H. Fei and Gustav Ranis and can be understood as an extension of the Lewis model. It is also known as the Surplus Labor model. It recognizes the presence of a dual economy comprising both the modern and the primitive sector and takes the economic situation of unemployment and underemployment of resources into account, unlike many other growth models that consider underdeveloped countries to be homogenous in nature. According to this theory, the primitive sector consists of the existing agricultural sector in the economy, and the modern sector is the rapidly emerging but small industrial sector. Both the sectors co-exist in the economy, wherein lies the crux of the development problem. Development can be brought about only by a complete shift in the focal point of progress from the agricultural to the industrial economy, such that there is augmentation of industrial output. This is done by transfer of labor from the agricultural sector to the industrial one, showing that underdeveloped countries do not suffer from constraints of labor supply. At the same time, growth in the agricultural sector must not be negligible and its output should be sufficient to support the whole economy with food and raw materials. Like in the Harrod–Domar model, saving and investment become the driving forces when it comes to economic development of underdeveloped countries.
The Cambridge capital controversy, sometimes called "the capital controversy" or "the two Cambridges debate", was a dispute between proponents of two differing theoretical and mathematical positions in economics that started in the 1950s and lasted well into the 1960s. The debate concerned the nature and role of capital goods and a critique of the neoclassical vision of aggregate production and distribution. The name arises from the location of the principals involved in the controversy: the debate was largely between economists such as Joan Robinson and Piero Sraffa at the University of Cambridge in England and economists such as Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.
Paolo Sylos Labini was an Italian economist and a key figure in the economic debate in post-World War II Italy. He was a professor of political economy at Sapienza University of Rome and an active member of Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.