Rent, Resources, Technologies

Rent, resources, and technologies are three crucial issues to the understanding of history and economics. The scarcity of resources, its interplay with technology, and the role of rent in explaining both economic growth and income distribution are investigated by adopting a multi-sectoral and non-proportional model, where scarce resources impose several scale constraints that may slow growth, but may contribute to further development of new technologies. In this dynamic framework the category of rent acquires new dimensions with far-reaching implications for both the system of prices and the distribution of income. The analytical and formal-theoretical perspective of this book could be used as a basis for future historical and quantitative studies.

Historical and theoretical introduction to rent, resources and technologies.- Introduction.- Historical and empirical stylized facts.- Classical dynamics, scarcity, and surplus rent.- General static scarcity and marginal rent.- Dynamic and static scarcity, surplus and marginal rent: comparisons and developments.- Specific natural scarcities.- Growth without natural scarcities.- Complex development and relative scarcities.- Relative and absolute scarcities.- Scarce resources and structural rent in static conditions.- Resources, complex and dynamic scarcities, technological rent.- Conclusions and further lines of analysis.- Production and distribution: data, hypothesis and problems.- Introduction.- Basic products and primary commodities (PCC1).- Non-produced means of production (NPMP) and the processes directly using them.- Commodities and processes not directly using NPMP.- Technical coefficients and shares of necessary consumption.- Production techniques.- The viability of the techniques.- Scale constraints of the techniques and technological scarcity.- Production technologies.- Dimension of the economic system.- Some problems: new interdependence between production and distribution.- The order of efficiency (OE).- The levels of activity of the economic system.- The technology of the economic system.- The technology of the economic system.- The order of rentability.- Induced changes in the distribution of income.- Autonomous changes in the distribution of income.- Static analysis and dynamic analysis.- Conclusions.- Order of efficiency.- Introduction.- The general system price-distribution.- The sub-system prices-wage-profit.- The rent sub-system and types of rent.- The central role of NPMP.- Static price-distribution order of efficiency.- The order of efficiency with zero wage and maximum rate of profit.- The order of efficiency with zero profit maximum unit wage.- The order of efficiency with unit wage and rate of profit different fromzero.- The order of physical efficiency.- Comparison among orders of efficiency.- Production with global technologies in static settings.- Introduction.- The physical system with one technique.- Global technologies and splitting coefficients.- The physical system with two techniques.- The physical economic system with k techniques.- Technology and the aggregate economic system.- Technology and the disaggregate economic system.- Changes in efficiency, in activity and efficiency proxies: some premises.- Changes in efficiency and price efficiency.- Growth of the production activity.- Conclusions and further lines of analysis.- Rent, distribution, prices.- Introduction.- The solving sub-system pw and the general system price-distribution.- Total distributive variables and value of the net product.- The order of rentability and its induced changes.- A simple case with one primary commodity and one final commodity.- Induced changes of wages and profits.- Autonomous changes in distribution: general propositions.- Autonomous changes with a stable solving sub-system and the effects on rents.- Autonomous changes with a stable solving sub-system and discontinous rent.- Autonomous changes with variable rents.- Autonomous changes in the solving sub-system with permanent rent.- Reduction in the technology dimension and effects on the distributive variables.- Conclusions.- Non-equiproportional dynamics with compound technologies: productions.- Introduction.- Towards dynamic systems: accumulation and residuals.- Introduction to compound technologies.- Equiproportional maximum growth with only one sub-system.- Non-equproportional growth with two techniques: compound technology and residuals.- The residuals and their possible utilization.- The total variables of the compound technology.- The rates of growth of productions.- The rates of growth of net products.- Comparisons between growth rates of productions and net products.- The rates of net