The distribution of capital and income in general and its re lation to wealth and economic growth in particular have attrac ted economists' interest for a long time already. Especially the, at least partially, conflicting nature of the two politi cal objectives, namely to obtain substantially large economic growth and a "just" income distribution at the same time, has caused the topic to become a subject of political discussions. As a result of these discussions, numerous models of workers' participation in the profits of growing economies have been developed. To a minor extent and with quite diverse success, some have been implemented in practice. It is far beyond the scope of this work to outline all these approaches from the past centuries and, in particular, the past decades. In economic theory many authors, for instance Kaldor [1955], Krelle [1968], [1983], Pasinetti [1962], Samuelson and Modigli ani [1966], to name but a few, have analyzed the long-term eco nomic implications of workers' saving and investment. While most of this extensive literature is highly interesting, it suffers from the fact that it does not explicitly consider either workers' or capitalists' objectives and thus neglects their impacts on economic growth. Thus, in the framework of a neo-classical model, these objectives and their impacts will be emphasized here.
Modern welfare economics as it is known today to economists took its final shape with the emergence of the Arrow-Debreu model. The classical conjectures about the beneficient workings of markets together with the converse statement, that optimal (in the sense of Pareto) allocations may be sustained by prices and markets, has laid a firm foundation for further research in welfare economics. But more than that, it has inspired researchers to take up entirely new topics, notably by closer considerations of situations where the assumptions of the original model may seem overly restrictive. One of these new directions has been connected with generalizing the model so that it takes into account the possibility of infinitely many commodities. On the face of it, the idea of an infinity of commodities may seem a mathematical fancy having no "real" counterpart in economic life. This is not so, however. Quite to the contrary, infinity enters in a very natural way when it is taken into account that economic transactions take place over time. 2 In the Arrow-Debreu formalism, time may be incorporated into the model in a very simple way using dated commodities. Thus two commodities are considered as being different if they are to be delivered at different points of time.
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