ABSTRACT
At the 1957 Corfu Conference where Kaldor first proposed his “stylized facts” as historical regularities, the French economist Alain Barrère presented a paper entitled “Capital Intensity and the Combination of Factors of Production” (see Barrère, 1965), challenging the conventional wisdom on firms' choice of technique. Barrère argued that when drafting their investment plans firms typically considered various indicators before selecting the appropriate technology. The technical designs were classified in a descending order of capital intensity. In his view, technical progress did not take place incrementally through minor changes in existing methods, but in lumpy replacements of older equipment with new vintage technology.
