ABSTRACT
This chapter is about investments and investment decisions, and how access to productive capital assets should be allocated to individual worker councils. The industry federations play a prominent role in the long term development and investment planning in a participatory economy, and we begin by discussing their organisation. Our next focus is the long-term development planning procedure, which precedes the investment planning and deals with such issues as how a participatory economy can and should organise its international trade, how to achieve a long-term sustainable environmental development, and how to adapt the labour supply to other long-term decisions and the economy’s expected composition and development. On an overall level, investment planning in any economy deals with two issues: (1) how much consumption do we want to sacrifice today to be able to consume more tomorrow, or differently put, how do we want to allocate the economy’s total production between consumption and investment, and (2) how should investments, in the form of different capital assets, be allocated between industries and workplaces. We describe how these issues can be handled in an efficient way, based on the values of a participatory economy. We then go through how capital assets can be accounted for, and finally, we describe how individual worker councils get access to existing capital assets and how the user rights fees that are charged for access to capital assets are determined.
