Old Papers On Rent And One New One

This post annotates some papers that I want to remind myself of.

Montani (1975) references Quadrio Curzio (in Italian), defines the order of fertility and rentability, notes that they are different, and has something like the reswitching of the order of fertility. He does not have the reswitching of the order of rentability. He treats both extensive and intensive rent, but does not combine them. He notes the wage frontier can slope up under intensive rent. I have to read more closely to see if he already has multiple cost-minimizing techniques. I am under the impression that D'Agata first notice this possibility.

Montet (1979) criticizes Metcalfe and Steedman in that their perversities are more general than they know. Land provides another degree of freedom. They have a wage, rent, rate of profits frontier. I generally do not set equations for natural resources out this way. I once set out an example with heterogeneous labor, relabeling 'land' as 'skilled labor'.

Gibson & McLeod (1983) look at extensive, intensive, and external intensive rent. They go into difficulties of defining basics in joint production. One definition is about the decomposability of matrices and the other is about the rank of some sort of block matrix. They define quasi-basics for the latter. D’Agata has some sort of objection to this. They have interchanges in both the CJE and the RRPE.

Erreygers (1995) considers joint production. Toward the end of his paper, he shows how extensive rent fits into this framework. He wants to avoid setting out another equation in the quantity system to constrain levels of operations of processes from requiring more land to be farmed than exist. And rents should be part of the price vector in the price system, not seperate variables. Kurz & Salvadori (1995) show how to define certain block structured matrices to achieve this end. I think Erreygers may have created this approach.

Ianni (2026) is about international trade, not rent. The theory of intensive and extensive rent can show why most lands are specialized, so the theory may have implications for the theory of international trade. Also, my way of analyzing the choice of technique with long-lasting and given ratios of the rate of profits among industries may have implications for trade. Different countries may be modeled as having different rates of profits.

References

• Erreygers, Guido. 1995. On the uniqueness of cost-minimizing techniques. The Manchester School 63: 145-166
• Gibson, Bill and Darryl McLeod. 1983. Non-produced means of production in Sraffa's system: basics, non-basics and quasi-basics. Cambridge Journal of Economics 7: 141-150.
• Ianni, Guido. 2026. Class struggle and the international division of surplus: The distributive surface in the open economy. Metroeconomica
• Montani, Guido. 1975. Scarce natural resources and income distribution. Metroeconomica 27(1): 68=101.
• Montet, C. 1979. Reswitching and primary input use: a comment. Economic Journal 89 (355): 642-647.