Economia Politica. Rivista di teoria e analisi

Abstracts of articles published in no.1, 1998

Sommari degli articoli pubblicati nel n.1, 1998

Index 1998 (forthcoming)
Content of no.1, 1998

Summaries

Introductory Note

Heretical Policies for Employment
by Giorgio Lunghini
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In recent years the stable and biunivocal coupling of the production of commodities and the employment of living human labour has changed. It is still true that if production declines, employment falls, but the opposite, if production recovers then employment also recovers, is no longer true. This stylised fact demands an answer to three questions: What are its causes ? How can the existing employment be maintained ? and What should be done with the unemployed ? This paper presents some "heretical" proposals which have been recently put forward as partial remedies for unemployment: the basic income, the reorganisation of working time and the socially useful jobs. All three may be combined in a global project whose basic fourth element is a real industrial policy. The heresy lies in the well founded principle that the causes of unemployment, and then its remedies, must be sought not only in the labour market but in the economic and social system on the whole.

Articles

Capabilities Development and Labour Organisation (J.E.L.: O33, J24)
by Gian Carlo Cainarca and Francesca Sgobbi
The paper explores the mutual dependencies which characterise the parallel evolution of technology and organisational structures, and their impact over the development of capabilities and the creation of knowledge. Referring to the ongoing debate about the post-Fordist production models, the paper underlines how the diffusion of innovative technologies involves a deep change in the nature of labour, and consequently requires to update the principles driving the choice of a specific labour organisation. The need for a parallel approach to the evolution of technology and organisation is explored through three subsequent steps. The first part of the paper reviews the concept of technology and outlines the connection between technology-based competition and the creation and development of new knowledge and capabilities within the organisation. The second part explores the links between the organisational structure and the required capabilities, while the last one deepens the concept of "labour" as the result of the capabilities development. An analysis of the contents of labour within different productive contexts underlines the need for coherence between the process of labour division and the attempt to develop the capabilities required within the organisation.

Endogenously Determined Information Flow and Markets Structure (J.E.L.: D50, D52)
by Susanna Mancinelli
The assumption of an endogenously determined information flow in a dynamically complete markets model has dramatic effects on the theory of general equilibrium. It has already been shown in previous papers that the choices of agents with regard of information filtration can affect markets structure. This means that the economy can be taken from a Pareto optimal to a sub-optimal equilibrium, in which only the agents who choose to modify markets structure are strictly better off. In this paper it is shown that if the information filtration is determined endogenously in a dinamically complete markets model, then, because of non co-operative strategic considerations, some agents always decide to modify markets structure towards incompleteness. This is true both in case they believe that they will be better off, and in case they believe that they will be worse off.

Internal Demand and Labour Income: A Note on the Role of "Employment Multiplier" (J.E.L. J23, E12, E24, O33)
by Paolo Piacentini and Paolo Pini
The paper suggests an accounting scheme of the impact of demand side factors, i.e. growth, composition and distribution of income, on the determination of changes in the aggregate balance of employment. The level of employment warranted in a system is here derived from the application of a simple scheme which we have called, following the contributions of Richard Kahn and John Maynard Keynes in the '30s, the "employment multiplier". Starting from an accounting identity between the values of aggregate supply and demand, a level of "warranted" employment is derived, given the labour coefficient and the deflated values of final demand, in which autonomous components are distinguished from an induced component, this latter depending on total labour income. Thus, the variations of aggregate employment for a country can be decomposed into the effects of the contributions of three components: growth of average productivity of labour, growth of "autonomous" demand components, and variations of the "multiplier", a term which summarises the impact of wage share and consumption propensity on induced demand and again on the level of overall employment. On the basis of this framework, we have worked out a quantitative assessment with temporal comparison within a national context. The aim has been to rebuild the employment pattern for Italy "warranted" on the factors indicated above, with specific timing in the period 1960-1996 required in identifying differential behaviours of the relation between employment growth and production growth.

Review Article

Economic Growth and Unemployment: Recent Theoretical Developments (J.E.L. J64, O40)
by Maurizio Pugno
In the received theory the "natural" rate of growth (Solow) and the "natural" rate of unemployment (Friedman) are independent. Recently, this dichotomy has been reformulated by employing the hypothesis of the trade union. This paper will show, however, that various attempts are emerging in the literature to drop this dichotomy. The key-hypotheses are: technological complementarity between capital accumulation and employment, search costs in the labour market, implementation costs of new techniques, endogenous growth theory, strategic complementarity between human capital accumulation and employment. The main results concern the conditions which make the relationship between growth and unemployment negative or positive; the theoretical weakening of "natural" rate of unemployment; the emergence of various forms of inefficiency.

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