10.1 Manual de Bienvenida:
10.1.9 Horarios de trabajo y break:
If supply or output potential responds to demand, this raises the crucial question of what it means to say that output growth is supply determined, or constrained by supply, which is the prevailing orthodoxy. Of course, it is true in a trivial sense that capital and labour are required to produce output, and how much output is produced will also depend on the level of technical efficiency, but the really important question is: why does the growth of capital, labour and technical progress differ so much between countries? The supply orientated, neoclassical production function approach to the analy-sis of growth cannot answer this question, and for the most part never asks it!
In our view, demand should assume a central role in growth theory and must play a major part in the explanation of growth rate differences between countries. For most countries, and particularly developing countries, demand constraints bite long before capacity is reached, and as we have shown, supply capacity is elastic. In an open economy, the major long-run constraint on demand is likely to be its balance of payments, but this is another story – originally outlined by one of the present authors elsewhere (Thirlwall, 1979). There is now substantial empirical support for this view, and interested readers are referred to McCombie and Thirlwall (1994, 1997, 2004) and a Symposium in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics(1997).
NOTES
1. In Thirlwall (1969) both equations (1) and (2) were fitted to US and UK data over the period 1950 to 1967, and both procedures gave the same estimates ofgn: 2.9 per cent per annum for the UK and 3.3 per cent for the US – which seemed eminently reasonable.
2. The full regression results from which the various estimates in this section (and Table 4.1) are derived are available on request and can also be found in Leon-Ledesma and Thirlwall (2002).
3. Allowing for the endogeneity of %uusing instrumental variables does not alter the results.
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