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.

The Middle-Income Trap in the Perspective of the Austrian Capital Theory

This paper applies the Austrian capital theory to the problem why emerging economies fall into the middle-income trap and how they may escape. The analysis puts entrepreneurial action at the center with a focus on the subjectivist nature of capital and on the role of the entrepreneur as the creator of the capital structure based on expectations and his imagination. The central thesis says that when a developing country has come close to the lower bound of the income level of the industrialized countries in its catch-up process but does not open its economy to free markets and entrepreneurship, further economic progress will fail, and the country remains in the middle-income range. The paper identifies grand-scale malinvestments induced by government policies as the main culprit for a country to become stuck in the middle-income trap. The policy conclusion of the analysis is that the way out of the middle-income requires not more, but less intervention. Instead of more government spending, less spending is required and instead of promoting a few big companies, the country must open its markets to the full potential of entrepreneurial action.

THE AVERAGE PERIOD OF PRODUCTION: THE HISTORY AND REHABILITATION OF AN IDEA

Austrian capital theory tried to capture the intuitive and basically undeniable importance that time plays in economic life, but arguably was diverted down a blind alley with Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk’s average period of production, a purely physical measure of ‘roundaboutness’—the length of the production process. For the general case, such a measure is a chimera. But the intuition is strong, and the idea survived and reappeared at various points in the history of capital theory. Almost unknown to economists, an alternative value measure of roundaboutness has existed at least since John Hicks’s formulation of his average period (AP) in 1939, which, coincidentally, was exactly the same measure discovered by the financial actuary Frederick Macaulay in 1938, called by him “Duration” (D). Macaulay’s D, more richly interpreted as Hicks’s AP, is a measure that more appropriately captures what it was that the Austrians struggled to express over many years in their capital theory and in their analysis of the business cycle.