Piero Sraffa on Income Distribution

Abstract

Distributional aspect of Economics is very complex due to having many different dimensions such as social and cultural, economic and the most importantly political dimensions of it. Piero Sraffa is the one of the most exciting contributors of the economics science. However, his contribution doesn't contain an explicit theory of income distribution. While his open ended book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory does not cover distribution of social surplus, his abandonment of subsistence wage together with his reference to the pool of profit concept derived from his archive interpreted from Marxian exploitation of labor perspective. Nevertheless that abandonment and pool of profit concept might have been interpreted from technical perspective related to the problematic nature of necessities too. In our study Sraffa's theory and methodology is investigated with the help of archival material to analyze distributional implications of it from Political Economy perspective.