Sraffa on Multiple-Products Processes of Production: The Cases of Joint Production Proper and of Land of a Single Quality

The paper discusses Piero Sraffa’s work on joint production when preparing his book Production of Commodities by Measn of Commodities (1960). The paper makes extensive use of Sraffa’s papers in the 1940s and 1950s kept in the Wren Library in Cambridge, UK. The focus is on two problems that caused him serious difficulties: first, the problem of joint production proper and, secondly, the problem of the intensification of the cultivation of land of a single quality. Sraffa felt that if in the latter case he could not avoid marginalist concepts, which he deeply mistrusted, he would have to exclude intensive diminishing returns and intensive rent from his analysis. However, careful scrutiny convinced him that he could treat the problem to his own satisfaction in terms of a change in the proportion in which two methods of production are employed side by side on homogeneous land. The parallel to the case of joint production proper is close at hand, in which a change in the quantity of a particular product can be brought about by a change in the proportion in which two methods producing the product under consideration together with other products are employed. The stumbling blocks in the way of his revival of the classical approach to the theory of value and distribution were thus successfully removed.