Sraffa

Piero Sraffa (1898–1983) was an Italian economist whose work helped shape the Cambridge School of economics. He is best known for his theory of prices and distribution and for initiating the Sraffian or Neo-Ricardian tradition in economic thought.

His central contribution is the book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, published posthumously in 1960. The work collects lectures and notes that reconstruct a classical theory of value and distribution. Rather than appealing to marginal utility or demand, it treats the prices of produced goods as determined by the physical relationships of production. The analysis uses a fixed set of production coefficients—how much of each input is required to produce each commodity—and, for a given split of income between wages and profits, derives a system of linear equations whose solution yields the prices of production.

The work had a major impact on economic theory and sparked the Cambridge capital controversy, a long-running debate over the nature of capital, the measurement of value, and the relationship between prices and production. It influenced post-Keynesian and neo-Ricardian economists and remains a central reference in discussions of input-output analysis and the theory of value.

Sraffa held academic posts in Italy and at Cambridge University, where his work influenced generations of economists, philosophers of economics, and historians of economic thought. He died in 1983.