The large aggregates in the economy - consumption, investment, production of the domestic and the international sectors, international capital flows, financial accumulation and indebtedness - are analysed in this book as problems in time-optimisation for enterprises and households. The effects of fiscal and monetary policies along with exchange-rate variation are examined, and their simultaneous use for stabilizing demand are found to be necessary. All household decisions on consumptions, savings, and financial disposition are conditioned by uncertainty, and similarly for firms, who make more complex simultaneous decisions on production, real investment, financing, and market strategy. The marginal efficiency-of-investment function derived from these decisions is fundamentally different from the marginal productivity of capital in the neoclassical sense. An economy which grows through the accumulation of capital, increase in labor supply, and technological progress is the framework in which all of these variables move. This codetermines the allocation of factors between domestic and international production, and the development of foreign trade. The growth both of the public debt and of international investment are treated in depth.

This macroeconomic study examines in a growth context the international feedbacks and constraints on house- holds' and firms' decisions, treated as time-optimizing problems under risk aversion. The economy finds its full-employment time-path only via monetary and fiscal measures, and exchange-rate adjustment.

I The Growth Path.- A. Allocation under Full Employment.- B. Allocation with Underemployment.- II On Aggregate Stability of Closed and Open Economies.- A The Closed Economy.- B. The Open Economy.- C. Concluding Remarks.- III Underutilized Resources.- A. The Case of Full Complementarity.- B. An Economy with Mixed Forms of Production.- C. Concluding Remarks.- IV Risk Averse, Time Optimizing Behavior of Households: Comparison With German Microcensus Data.- A. A Risk-Averse Time-Optimizing Model.- B. Comparison with Some Evidence.- C. Concluding Remarks.- V Investment Behavior In An Open Economy.- A. Price, Output, and Factor-Combination Decisions of the Firm.- B. Investment Decisions.- C. The Investment Function in Three Sectors.- D. Changing Investment under Full Employment.- E. Risk Aversion and Risk Avoidance.- VI The Labor Market And Wage Determination.- A. The Wage Rate Endogenous.- B. The Wage Rate as Exogenous Variable.- C Money Wages and the Rate of Inflation.- D. Real Wage Determination under Full Employment.- E. Summary.- VII The Market For Financial Assets And Monetary Policy.- A. Characterization of the Monetarist View.- VIII Growth Once More: Income And Claims To Wealth.- A. Claims to Wealth.- B. Growth of Public Debt and Debt Service.- C. External Claims.- D. The International Exchange of Assets.- Author Index.