Carl Menger’s revisited theory of capital in opposition to the Classical and Marginalist scholars’

Among several contributions, Carl Menger proposed a division of economic goods in orders. This sets the foundations for the Austrian capital theory, usually maintained as a complex of higher orders goods in a production process. Curiously, Menger dismissed this concept of capital, in favor of one used in common parlance. This change of view is often overlooked, but represents a turning point in the field of capital theory. This paper assesses how Menger's popular notion of capital differs from the scientific one. To achieve this goal, we investigate the concept of capital in Classical and Marginalist economists. One of the implications is that the popular concept is related to the theory of capitalism. Capital, as used in business language for economic calculations, is better suited for analyzing the capitalist system, as it captures the usage in monetary economies and business accounting.

Livestock Frontiers

The word livestock itself suggests the reduction of animals as living things to animals as economic goods. Disaggregating the term into its component parts—live and stock—also suggest the difficulty of rendering things that are alive into things that are stocked, especially on large or predicable scales. The be alive is biological; living things breathe, eat, defecate, move, sleep, grow, reproduce, connect with others, get sick, die. To be stock, on the other hand, is economic; stocks are things held and exchanged. In capitalist relations specifically, livestock (and livestock parts) are owned, quantified, rationalized, commodified, specialized, simplified, contracted, accumulated, speculated upon, traded, sold. Ongoing attempts to make living things into stocks, or commodities, are rife with contradictions and impossibilities. Fundamentally, biological bodies are barriers to accumulation. The unruliness of living stocks—including their biological needs, the time they take to grow and mature, their propensities toward genetic diversity, and their vulnerabilities in environments where diversity is strictly denied—make them particularly difficult to standardize and simplify for the market. Just as Karl Polanyi (1944) unveiled the fiction of land, labor, and money as commodities, animals must join this list.

On the Reachability of a Feedback Controlled Leontief-Type Singular Model Involving Scheduled Production, Recycling and Non-Renewable Resources

This paper proposes and studies the reachability of a singular regular dynamic discrete Leontief-type economic model which includes production industries, recycling industries, and non-renewable products in an integrated way. The designed prefixed final state to be reached, under discussed reachability conditions, is subject to necessary additional positivity-type constraints which depend on the initial conditions and the final time for the solution to match such a final prescribed state. It is assumed that the model may be driven by both the demand and an additional correcting control in order to achieve the final targeted state in finite time. Formal sufficiency-type conditions are established for the proposed singular Leontief model to be reachable under positive feedback, correcting controls designed for appropriate demand/supply regulation. Basically, the proposed regulation scheme allows fixing a prescribed final state of economic goods stock in finite time if the model is reachable.

National Innovation Capacity and Economic Progress of Countries

The ability of the national economy to create and to valorize innovations on the market in order to produce economic goods represents its national innovation capacity, which is at the same time a key determinant of countries’ economic progress. Due to this fact, its relevance imposes the task of identifying, as accurately as possible, the key theoretical postulates on which this concept is based, as well as calculating the Innovation capacity index by which it is possible to predict progress in building innovation capacity of individual countries and mutual comparison with other countries according to innovation capabilities. After a brief explanation of the essence of learning, on which this concept is based, an attempt is made to calculate the Innovation capacity of the European Union and the Western Balkans, on the one hand, and to consider the interdependence of the obtained results and the achieved level of their economic development in 2020, on the other hand. The results of the research confirmed the strong connection between the Innovation capacity index and the achieved level of economic development of countries expressed in terms of gross domestic product per capita.

Winners and Losers in Energy Transition: Study Case of Wood Biomass Power-Plants Implementation in France

International policies promote renewable forms of energy to mitigate climate change. In Europe, the production of electricity using wood biomass represents one of the most popular energy alternatives. In 2012, France initiated a large-scale strategy to develop wood biomass energy. The biggest wood biomass power-plant project has been developed in the French Mediterranean area and its huge size raises several issues for the short- and long-term sustainability of local forests and associated economic sectors. The French Mediterranean forests provide four types of economic goods (private, club, common, and public goods) and multiple ecosystem services, which makes them complex to manage under an energy transition policy. In this paper, we applied three qualitative methods, namely interviews, participative workshops, and observant participation, and three conceptual models, namely (i) Ostrom’s (2010) self-organization key conditions, (ii) the types of economic goods classified according to their excludability and rivalry properties, and (iii) the ecosystem service categorization system of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). With our methods, we show that the renewable strategy chosen in France replicates the current centralized production model based on fossil and nuclear fuels. Thus, we demonstrate that European, national, and local authorities fail to consider the multiple ecosystem services that forest management strategies should include to face the energy transition, climate change, and the other ecological challenges of the 21st century.

The Challenge of State-Building in Historical Perspective

Over the past decades scholars have increasingly recognized that strong, effective states are an essential prerequisite for a wide variety of political and economic goods. Yet while many recent studies remind us that strong, effective states are important and explain how they differ from weak, predatory ones, few focus on how such states actually develop. An examination of the European experience reveals that, in the past as today, centralizing authority was an extremely difficult process. The particular strategies state-builders used to defeat their adversaries, or at least gain their acquiescence, profoundly impacted subsequent political development in general and the challenges associated with establishing high-quality government in particular since these strategies critically influenced whether or how easily a state could develop.

Interpersonal Comparison of Utility by Measuring Neural Activity

Aggregating welfare across individuals to reach collective decisions is one of the most fundamental problems in our society. Interpersonal comparison of utility is pivotal and inevitable for welfare aggregation, because if each person's utility is not interpersonally comparable, there is no rational aggregation procedure that simultaneously satisfies even some very mild conditions for validity (Arrow's impossibility theorem). However, scientific methods for interpersonal comparison of utility have thus far not been available. Here, we have developed a method for interpersonal comparison of utility based on brain signals, by measuring the neural activity of participants performing gambling tasks. We found that activity in the medial frontal region was correlated with changes in expected utility, and that, for the same amount of money, the activity evoked was larger for participants with lower household incomes than for those with higher household incomes. Furthermore, we found that the ratio of neural signals from lower-income participants to those of higher-income participants coincided with estimates of their psychological pleasure by "impartial spectators", i.e. disinterested third-party participants satisfying specific conditions. Finally, we derived a decision rule based on aggregated welfare from our experimental data, and confirmed that it was applicable to a distribution problem. These findings suggest that our proposed method for interpersonal comparison of utility enables scientifically reasonable welfare aggregation by escaping from Arrow's impossibility and has implications for the fair distribution of economic goods. Our method can be further applied for evidence-based policy making in nations that use cost-benefit analyses or optimal taxation theory for policy evaluation.

Implementation of the principle of payment of land-use on the example of land tax: possibilities and issues

This article examines the relevant problems of land law – one of the most dynamically developing branches of law in the Russian Federation, and one of the first to undergo changes in the context of modernization of vectors of state legal policy. Analysis is conducted on the fundamental importance of the principle of payment of land-use on the example of land tax. The author explores the problems of the object of land tax and tax base, calculation of cadastral value. The conclusion is made that the chosen path of development of the land tax is unfeasible, thereby requiring an alternative solution. According to the legislation of the Russian Federation, land is one of the key economic goods. The Russian legislator gives close attention to the commerce in land of various purpose. Land tax is the equivalent of rental charge. Such similarity is interchangeable in judicial practice. There are a number of issues in land tax regulation. The constituent entities of the Russian Federation are currently limited to establishing the exhaustive list of local taxes. The organizations and private entities are not recognized as taxpayers individuals with regards to land plots in uncompensated limited use or under a lease agreement. The post-Soviet states attribute land plots with ownership right as an object of taxation. The legislative and law enforcement practice on land tax in the Russian Federation indicates a close connection between land and civil legislation. For the purpose of replenishment of budgets, the Russian Federation took the path of increasing the tax burden. It is necessary to find the new ways for implementing the principle of payment of land-use in form of land tax, which would effectively address the problems of local financing.

Innovative economy: barrier or impulse for the development of borderline-dangerous conditions of meso-formations

The analysis of the provisions of economic science reveals the need for replacing the resource-based economy for innovative, which is explained by the growing scarcity of economic resources in the context of increasing demands of the actors for economic goods. However, most scientific elaborations focus solely on the positive consequences of implementation of innovations, rather than negative caused by the unwillingness of economic entities to innovative changes due to shortage of resources, scant involvement of the government agencies of meso-level in the process of simulating innovative initiatives, low interest of the end consumer in the innovative product. The goal of this article lies in substantiation of feasibility of using individual approach towards meso-formations in the context of switching the economic course, which would take into account the internal territorial peculiarities and impede the emergence of borderline-dangerous conditions. Assessment is conducted on the readiness of regional economies for innovative changes, which confirming high differentiation of meso-formations by a number of criteria that reflect the state of the local innovative environment. Based on the calculations and subsequent analysis carried out on the resource capacity of the territories, the author concluded on infeasibility of application of the “typical” rearrangement of the vector of their socioeconomic development.