A New Classification of Goods in Sraffa-Price-Systems: Basic Capital Goods, Non-Basic Capital Goods and Consumption Goods

Sraffa (1960) introduced a classification of goods which has been used without modification for a long time. According to him goods have to be classified as basic and non-basic commodities. Among non-basic commodities, he extracts goods which are used directly and indirectly in the production of pure consumption goods. Pure consumption goods are neither used directly and nor indirectly in production the of a commodity. However, Sraffa regards pure consumption goods as non-basic commodities. Thus, one always needs to be careful, i.e. speaking of non-basic commodities, one needs to concretize what kind of non-basic commodity it is - a pure consumption good or not. I suggest the introduction of a new classification which does not principally change Sraffa's assumptions in his models, but concretizes definitions of the kinds of goods. I regard Sraffa's basic commodities as "basic capital goods", Sraffa's non-basic commodities, which are used as inputs for production of Sraffa's non-basic commodities as "non-basic capital goods", and Sraffa's non-basic commodities which are not used as inputs for production of any commodity, i.e. Sraffa's pure consumption goods simply as "consumption goods". I understand “capital goods” as being any good which is used as input in the input coefficient matrix of any Sraffa-Price-System in the frame work of Sraffa's interpretation at least one time. Key words: One-Product-Sraffa-Price-System, Multiple-Product- Sraffa-Price-System, basic capital goods, non-basic capital goods, consumption goods, subsystem of basic capital goods, indecomposable matrices JEL classifications: B12, D33, D46, E11