ABSTRACT
The Hotelling Rule is an application of the concept of a competitive (uniform) rate of profits to all processes in the economy, whether these are conservation or production processes. The chapter specify the two fundamental assumptions required in order to be able to establish the fact that all prices need to change over time because of the Hotelling Rule. Then, it confronts these assumptions with alternative ones which, it will be argued, are characteristic of the analyses of Smith and Ricardo. The chapter provides a mathematical formulation of the Ricardian point of view which allows one to compare the latter with the one underlying the Hotelling Rule. It concludes that Ricardo may have well come up with the modern interpretation of the Hotelling Rule had he considered the case of the exhaustion of a resource in its entirety as a realistic possibility, which apparently he did not.
