Decomposing the Changes in Production Prices into "Capital-Intensity" and "Price" Effects: Theory and Evidence from the Chinese Economy

This paper deals with the changes in prices of production inducedby variations in income distribution on the basis of a linearmodel of production with circulating capital and homogeneouslabour. It is shown that the total effect of income distributionon prices can be decomposed into a "capital-intensity" and a"price" effect and that, in actual economies, the former isexpected to dominate the latter. In order to obtain a concreteidea of the actual trajectories of the price movements and toquantify the relative strength of the two effects, we use input–outputdata of the Chinese economy.