‘Sharpening the tools’: A comment on the provisional 1988 Social Accounting Matrix for South Africa

This article comments on the recent contribution by Eckert et al (1992) in this journal. The comments place social accounting in a historical perspective. This is done to illustrate the effectiveness of SAMs in policy analysis, and to explain the increased mathematisation of economics caused by social accounting. Finally, some comments are made on the future development of social accounting in South Africa in order to push the SAM framework to its limit.     

An example of multiple minima in a Cochrane-Orcutt procedure with multiple autocorrelation

We provide an example, based on an equation of the Canadian-US exchange rate, of multiple minima in a generalized Cochrane-Orcutt procedure. Our experiments suggest the need for search procedures in order to correctly identify autocorrelation structures.     

The ideology of class and tourism confronting the discourse of advertising

Starting from Baudrillard's analysis of the ideological character inherent in all consumption, touristic consumption, for many reasons ,has a special place in this social semantic. Here, advertising plays an important if not essential role because tourism is a product consumed outside of normal time and daily social space. Therefore the social semantic asserts itselfless through the product itself than through its representation: the discourse of advertising. But advertising discourse is plural, each form having its own ideology, competing with others. Behind the commercial competition lies a competition of social classes, but with a new typology, no longer based on the capital/favor relationship. Four ideological models are analyzed and illustrated with their advertising messages: the traditional model, the clerical/executive model, the youth model, and the “intellectual class” model.     

The Hungarian alternative to soviet-type planning

The basic features of the post-1968 Hungarian economic system are compared with the traditional Soviet model. In practice the New Economic Mechanism has differed both from the model outlined in reform proposals and from the Soviet model as well. These latter differences include changes in planning behavior, instruments used to control resource allocation, and the evaluation of enterprises. The social constraints to system changes as revealed by the Hungarian experience are analyzed, and recent developments in the reform of the Hungarian economic system are evaluated.     

Profit rates and structural variables in French manufacturing industries

In this paper, the authors apply the theory of industrial organization to the French manufacturing sector. Profit rates of industries and firms are related to concentration on the product market, differentiation, economies of scale, absolute capital cost requirements and to firm sizes. The analysis suggest that concentration on the seller's side may lead to misallocation of resources in industries in which barriers to entry are high. They also suggest that large firms may be less efficient than smaller firms. These results call into question the industrial policy of the French government over the last ten years.