Capital Labour Substitution in the Large-scale Food-processing Industry in Pakistan: Some Recent Evidence
Food-processing is one of the first industries developed by man. Most agricultural commodities require some sort of processing for them to be edible. In primitive societies man processed his own food using the simple mortar and pestle. With the advent of industrialisation there emerged important implications for foodprocessing technologies. The workers in the industrial and commercial sectors of urban areas required greater supplies of food. This encouraged the establishment of processing plants supplemented by storage facilities to ensure that the urban population received the food that they required. Food-processing, therefore, began to occupy a fairly predominant position in the overall industrial sector. Its importance was heightened by its strong backward and forward linkages with the rest of the economy. In a labour-surplus developing economy, where most of the labour is unemployed or underemployed, the absorption of this surplus labour force in the industrial sector is an important issue. In recent decades, there has been significant growth in the industrial sector in most developing countries, in terms of both
A Generalization of the CES Production Function
T HE CES (constant elasticity of substitution) production function derived by Arrow, Chenery, Minhas, and Solow [2] has become widely known and widely used. Possibly the weakest point of the SMAC (Arrow, Chenery, Minhas and Solow) formulation is the assumption of". . . the existence of a relationship between V/L (value added per unit of labor) and W (the wage rates), independent of the stock of capital" [2, p. 231]. If this assumption does not hold, the value of the elasticity of substitution derived from the estimated CES function may be biased. The CES function is also subject to the limitation that the value of the elasticity of substitution is constant, although not necessarily unity. However, when the capital/ labor ratio varies, due to changes in the factor price ratio, it is possible that the elasticity of substitution will vary as the capital/labor ratio varies. The purposes of this paper are (1) to derive a more general form of the CES production function that does not depend on the SMAC assumption of independence and with a property of variable elasticity of substitution, (2) to examine the elasticity of substitution of the new function, and (3) to present some evidence of the desirability of using the new function.
Corporations and the Market for Law
The state competition for corporate law has long been studied as a distinct phenomenon. Under the traditional view, corporations are subject to a unique choice-of-law rule, the internal affairs doctrine (IAD). This rule is explained as a historical accident, or by the special logistics of the corporate contract. The resulting market for corporate law appears to have special characteristics, particularly including the dominance by the single state of Delaware. This paper challenges the traditional view. It shows that the corporate law market is best understood as a special application of the general market for law. Any differences are matters of degree rather than kind, and are explained by considerations underlying enforcement of all choice-of-law contracts rather than by factors unique to corporations. It follows that theories of corporate competition that ignore the broader law market context are incomplete, and that the competition for corporate law carries lessons for the law market generally. Moreover, the connection between the corporate and other law markets has implications for the nature of corporate law, the constitutional status of the IAD, the scope of the IAD, and for the relationship between state and federal law.