SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The Physiocrats and, in particular, Francois Quesnay’s tableau économique are often designated as common sources of influence for the classical economist Pierro Sraffa and Ecological Economics. This is particularly apparent in earlier contributions in the field of Ecological Economics which argued that Piero Sraffa’s physical and reproductive characterisation of the economy represent a suitable foundation for the joint analyses of the economic surplus, ecological and biophysical processes. Over the years, this assumed compatibility has resulted in various contributions that build on Sraffa’s seminal microeconomic framework based on relative prices, the exogenous determination of one or more distributional variables and long-period positions. This chapter presents a brief discussion of the Physiocrats and their impact on both the Sraffian tradition and Ecological Economics. This is followed by an examination of intensive and extensive land-rents in which we argue that the standard Sraffian framework already incorporates a narrow treatment of agro-ecological processes. The main aim of this chapter is to present the reader with a practical review of scholarly works that have extended the scope of Sraffa’s framework from an ecological perspective. It should be noted that this review is limited to microeconomic analyses in the Sraffian tradition and that comprehensive algebraic and technical details are disregarded. Instead, the focus lies with an exposition of each contribution’s originality with respect to the relation between ecological issues and surplus distribution.