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.

I — Historical and theoretical introduction to rent, resources, and technologies.- II — Production and distribution: data, hypothesis and problems.- III — Order of efficiency.- IV — Production with global technologies in static settings.- V — Rent, distribution, prices.- VI — Non-equiproportional dynamics with compound technologies: productions.- VII — Choice of technologies and dynamic-physical order of efficiency.- VIII — Choice of technologies and dynamic values efficiency order.- IX — Choice of technologies and dynamic price-distribution order of efficiency.- X — The dynamics of income distribution: total wages and their shares.- XI — Dynamics of profits, rents and their shares.- XII — Technical progress and technological change.- XIII — Technical and technological progress, rent, and income distribution.- XIV — Conclusions and further lines of research.- Appendix A — Techniques and technologies analyzed in the numerical examples (Chapters VII, VIII, IX, X, XI).- List of notations.- References.