ABSTRACT
Sergio Parrinello is to be credited with having pioneered the extension of Piero Sraffa’s analysis at least in two important directions.1 First, in 1970 he reformulated the pure theory of international trade within a ‘classical’ framework of the analysis in which capital consists of heteregeneous produced means of production (Parrinello 1970). This was the starting point of a number of contributions by Steedman, Metcalfe, Mainwaring and others who showed that several of the traditional trade theorems, derived within the Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson trade model, do not carry over to a framework with a positive rate of profits and heterogeneous capital goods. Second, in 1983 Parrinello turned to the problem of exhaustible resources, such as oil or gas, and asked critically whether the long-period method Sraffa had adopted can also deal with this case or whether it has to be abandoned in favour of some other method (Parrinello 1983). Also this paper triggered a number of contributions taking up the challenge.
