From: Francisco Paulo Cipolla (cipolla@UFPR.BR)
Date: Fri Nov 18 2005 - 19:22:20 EST
It would be interesting to know over which period is the stagnation of fixed investment referred to. In terms of the schemes of reproduction the sub-sector of machines (for instance) would be playing the role of allowing simple reproduction to procede whereas expansion/contraction of circulating capital occurs within a less than full utilization of the given productive capacity. A sort of defective simple reproduction, simple reproduction on average below simple reproduction. Strange. Paulo glevy@PRATT.EDU wrote: > I sent Jurriaan a copy of a working paper by Jochen Hartwig, > "On misusing national accounts data for Governance Purposes" > > < http://e-collection.ethbib.ethz.ch/ecol-pool/incoll/incoll_1029.pdf >. > > Many of you should be interested in that paper -- after all, > many here teach national income accounting as part of macro > courses and/or use those accounts for empirical research purposes. > > Jurriann replied as follows (forwarded with his permission). > > In solidarity, Jerry > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Jurriaan Bendien > Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 11:39 AM > Subject: Re: misusing national accounts data > > No I haven't seen it, though in my field of interest. Thank you for making > me aware of it. My criticism of national accounts is not so much that they > are pure nonsense, but rather that it takes quite a bit of reaggregation > to make sense out of them. At present, for example, in the Netherlands > real GDP growth is practically zero (well, 0.3% or something like that). > If you were to regard GDP as a measure of national income, you would > conclude that it is static. But in fact, much net property income is not > included in GDP, and in particular capital gains, rents and a portion of > net interest receipts. The reason is the specific definition of income > regarded to be related to production. So in reality, the national income > is increasing more than real GDP growth, the late Seymour Melman called it > "profits without production". This becomes visible only when you look at > income & outlay accounts, BOP data, tax data and the capital accounts > data. In many countries, capital gains are not taxed, or taxed only > selectively, and for that reason, no reliable data exists on capital gains > - realised from sales, or present as asset appreciation. Whereas FDI data > present a picture of foreign assets held, typically data on the value of > domestic assets is rather fragmentary. Consequently it's often difficult > to say what the magnitudes are. At a guess, about a quarter of realised > incomes in advanced capitalist countries these days represent income from > property transactions of one kind or another. This masks the fall in > Marxian output values. The most telling feature of "profits without > production" is the overall stagnation of fixed investment, and if you look > at disaggregated fixed investment data, you realise that a lot of it > consists of computers and furniture, furnishings etc. rather than real > plant & equipment that would increase productive capacity. Not altogether > surprising if average real capacity utilisation is at 70-80%.
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