An appraisal of Piero Sraffa's 'The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions'

The paper proposes a new interpretation of Sraffa's 1926 Economic Journal article, ‘The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions’, according to which the latter derives from the same strategy of research which underlies its 1925 Italian precursor, ‘Sulle relazioni fra costo e quantità prodotta’. Sraffa tested the explanatory power of a Marshallian monopolistic partial equilibrium model and concluded that that model is able to treat one source of variable returns (firm-internal economies); but this articulation of Marshall‘s theory does not substantially improve on the trade-off between logical consistency and empirical relevance which afflicted the theory in its whole.