IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/cambje/v28y2004i1p121-132.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On Sraffa's Standard commodity

Author

Listed:
  • Enrico Bellino

Abstract

The necessity of expressing the relative price of a commodity in terms of another commodity makes it impossible to distinguish that part of any change that can be ascribed to the characteristics of the commodity itself from the part of that change that is to be ascribed to the characteristics of the commodity of reference, i.e., the numÈraire. Ricardo (1817) was the first to point out this problem and the need to find an 'invariable measure of value', but he was not able to solve the problem. In 1960, Sraffa suggested using a bundle of commodities, that he called 'Standard commodity', to accomplish this function, claiming that it was a standard of value invariant with respect to changes in the distribution of income. But in Sraffa's book there is no explicit proof of this claim. This gave rise to many misunderstandings about the Standard commodity and its role as invariable measure of value. This paper proposes a proper definition of an 'invariable measure of value', and then proves that the Sraffa 'Standard commodity' does fulfil the requirements of this definition. Copyright 2004, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Enrico Bellino, 2004. "On Sraffa's Standard commodity," Cambridge Journal of Economics, Cambridge Political Economy Society, vol. 28(1), pages 121-132, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:28:y:2004:i:1:p:121-132
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kurose, Kazuhiro & Yoshihara, Naoki, 2019. "On the Ricardian invariable measure of value in general convex economies," Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 539-549.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:cambje:v:28:y:2004:i:1:p:121-132. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/cje .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.