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Abstract

As Joan Robinson’s views matured, the study of expansion through the accumulation of capital moved more and more to central stage, and she increasingly sought to group other questions around it. Yet it proved a difficult nut to crack. Accumulation has been analyzed by economists in two very different ways, between which she moved uneasily The most common has been to see it as the expansion of the productive potential of an economy with a given technology, which may be improved in the process — this was her basic stance. But it has also been understood as the outright transformation of the technical and productive organization of the economy, an outlook of which she thoroughly approved, but which played almost no role in her analytics.

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© 1989 George R. Feiwel

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Nell, E. (1989). Accumulation and Capital Theory. In: Feiwel, G.R. (eds) Joan Robinson and Modern Economic Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08633-7_14

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