Vanek Jaroslav The Labor Managed Economy

Monograph comprising an evaluation of workers self management experiences in Peru and Yugoslavia - discusses the solutions to macroeconomics problems such as unequal income distribution, decision making on capital investment, and labour productivity within self-managed firms, etc., and considers micro and macro economic theory relating to efficiency and competition. Graphs and references.

Monograph presenting an economic theory in support of a new economic system based on workers' self-management (workers participation) - covers the equilibrium of a competitive enterprise and changing market conditions, the decentralization of decision making, labour supply functions, economic policy problems, 'income sharing' (wages) and wage incentive, the allocation of economic resources, legal aspects and basic institutional forms of the labour-managed economy, etc. Diagrams and references.

This book uses economic theory to argue that worker-controlled firms are rare due to market failures rather than inherent organizational defects. The book will be of interest to scholarly researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in economics, especially in industrial organization, labor economics, comparative economics, organizational economics, and finance.

Monograph on the philosophical and political aspects and implications for social change and economic development of an economic theory in support of a new economic system based on workers' self-management (workers participation) - includes an analysis of the over-all performance of the participatory economy of Yugoslavia. References.

Discusses the theory of labour-managed firms or producers' cooperatives, and of economies companies principally of such firms.

This essay is a tribute to Jaroslav Vanek who spent thirty-two years at Cornell University where he founded the Program on Participation and Labor-Managed Systems in 1970, which became the home for economic research on these issues in the United States. As such, it is a brief intellectual history of a multidimensional scholar. Vanek's seminal work in the American Economic Review in 1969 marked the culmination of a decade of work on labor-management inspired by his brother Jan's work on Yugoslavia, considered then to be a worker-managed economic system. In two rapidly following tomes, Vanek laid out the landscape for the development of a new sub-field in economics by providing precursors to many of the results to follow. In that previous decade, Vanek produced papers in traditional economic theory, e.g., international trade and economic growth. His mind set persists in the interplay between the emerging theory of labor-managed firms and traditional economic literature that takes seriously the role of organizational form. This essay develops that cross-pollination and seeks to identify the remaining questions and issues for future work that the economics profession owes to Jaroslav Vanek.

Provides a convenient introduction to heterodox alternatives to neoclassical economics.