This thesis examines the decentralisation of planning exercises in an economy where market behaviour alone is known not to be sufficient to support optimum allocations. Chapter 1 contains an overview of the problem, a justification for undertaking this investigation and a synopsis of results. Chapter 2 evaluates some iterative planning procedures that have been proposed to locate optima in the presence of constant and increasing returns to scale and presents some new results. Chapters 3 to 5 are concerned exclusively with answering some of the theoretical questions that arise in decentralising intertemporally optimal planning decisions. The reason this problem deserves attention is most conveniently discovered by referring to the existing literature on planning. Most models of decentralised planning, following Oskar Lange, are based on a systematic exploitation of the analogy between planning procedures and market adjustment processes. While this recognition of the formal similarity between free enterprise and socialist systems has produced some formidably impressive literature, it has, unfortunately, tended to focus attention too aiarrowly on planning in environments where the fundamental theorem of welfare economics is valid, i.e., where the market performs satisfactorily provided the authorities can control the distribution of income. The urge to undertake planning at all in these circumstances is difficult to explain.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:465880 |
| Date | January 1974 |
| Creators | Mitra, Pradeep K. |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0ef378ba-74ad-415d-bd3e-e6b986238fb0 |
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