Suchergebnisse

The large aggregates in the economy - consumption, investment, production of the domestic and the international sectors, international capital flows, financial accumulation and indebtedness - are analysed in this book as problems in time-optimisation for enterprises and households. The effects of fiscal and monetary policies along with exchange-rate variation are examined, and their simultaneous use for stabilizing demand are found to be necessary. All household decisions on consumptions, savings, and financial disposition are conditioned by uncertainty, and similarly for firms, who make more complex simultaneous decisions on production, real investment, financing, and market strategy. The marginal efficiency-of-investment function derived from these decisions is fundamentally different from the marginal productivity of capital in the neoclassical sense. An economy which grows through the accumulation of capital, increase in labor supply, and technological progress is the framework in which all of these variables move. This codetermines the allocation of factors between domestic and international production, and the development of foreign trade. The growth both of the public debt and of international investment are treated in depth

SUMMARYMost studies of international demand determinants have found income to be the significant explainer of variations in both imports and exports, while price appeared to have only marginal importance. The present study deals with exports to the United States from eight European countries and gives support to a rather different conclusion: Two price variables—a price index of imports from a particular country, and an index of general‐import prices—were significant and sometimes showed high elasticities. United States national income, on the other hand, was a poor explainer of imports from a country supplying finished manufactures, while industrial output was a fair explainer of imports from the suppliers of raw and semimanufactured materials.Of the two successful price variables, general‐import prices showed the higher numerical price elasticities. This fact was contrary to the theoretical expectation, and arguments were advanced for believing that there might be greater downward bias in the direct‐ than in the cross‐price elasticities of demand. It was concluded that in general the higher of the two calculated elasticities came closer to the true price elasticity for the country concerned.However, the findings, if taken at face value, also suggest that a European exporting country may be more successful in gaining dollar earnings at the expense of its rivals than at the expense of domestic United States producers. Elasticity with respect to United States domestic prices was low or insignificant; and total imports showed little price response.If it were in fact difficult for the non‐dollar world together or even for Europe alone, to adjust its dollar earnings by means of price, it would still be possible for the countries involved to adjust both their dollar and their overall balances. For to the extent that they reduced prices competitively they would be induced to substitute imports from one another for those from the United States.Finally, if the behaviour of overall United States imports can be taken as typical for manufacturing countries' imports, while particular countries' exports to the world as a whole respond to price much as do those to the United States, we can infer that their balance‐of‐trade adjustments to price will be mainly on the export, rather than on the import, side.