Suchergebnisse

This study observed rapidly rising shares of manufactured and electronic goods in Korea's total exports and a trend decline in Korea's terms of trade over the period of this study (1967-2001), in accordance with the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis. Contrary to the expectation of Prebisch, the increasing proportion of manufactured and electronic goods in Korea's exports exerted no favourable influence on the course of Korea's terms of trade. In fact, this study supports the later extension to the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis, that rather than an emphasis on relations between types of commodities there should be an emphasis on relations between types of countries.

Contrary to the classical proposition, the works of Prebisch and Singer launched the controversial hypothesis of long-term decline in the terms of trade of primary products vis-à-vis manufactures and a corresponding decline in the terms of trade of the South vis-à-vis the North. The present study traces the origin and evolution of the hypothesis and reviews the related statistical debate. It concludes that the empirical base of the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis is much stronger than it appeared in earlier decades. Reviewing some of the North-South models, the study also finds theoretical support for the Prebisch-Singer hypothesis.

In the "stagnationist" macroeconomics, the long-term problem of growth and distribution has been discussed in a short-period Kaleckian framework which abstracts from labor market-output market interaction to determine real wages. However, even in this framework, one can challenge the stagnationist conclusion that there is no trade-off between wage and profit and between distribution and growth. One way of doing this is to bring in the role of foreign price competition. Another way is to allow the possibility of saving out of wage income in a closed "stagnationist" framework presented here. Evidently, in a general framework, there is no unambiguous relationship between distribution and growth. So distributive justice should be taken as a separate objective on its own merit.