Technical and Organizational Progress and the Turnover of Capital

Abstract

First, this paper presents three different points of view on the long-run impact of technical and organizational progress on the time structure of production and circulation and thereby on the rate of capital turnover. Two of these approaches are Marxian (Hilferding and Andreff), one is Neo-Austrian (v. Weizsicker) but can easily be translated into a Marxian framework. Moreover, these expectations are confronted with empirical evidence on the rate of capital turnover in the U.S. manufacturing sector. Taking account of inflation and the effect of the business cycle, the results of the empirical analysis are not straightforward but suggest diverging development paths for the 21 industries under study. Still, during the '70s U.S. manufacturing companies seem to have in general succeeded in accelerating capital turnover by improving the time structure of production and circulation.