Economic reproduction involves: Karl Marx developed the original insights of Quesnay to model the circulation of capital, money, and commodities in the second volume of Das Kapital to show how the reproduction process that must occur in any type of society can take place in capitalist society by means of the circulation of capital.
Ernest Mandel additionally refers in his two-volume Marxist Economic Theory to contracted reproduction, meaning production on a smaller and smaller scale, in which case business operating at a loss outnumbers growing business (e.g., in wars, depressions, or disasters).
This is what Marx believed capitalists to be in business for: to produce a product sold at a higher value than the sum of input costs, thus generating profit.
It means that these processes tend to be increasingly reorganized to bring them in line with the requirements of the accumulation of capital.
[14] In this light, the ecological vision of a "zero-growth society" appears rather utopian; or, at the very least, its achievement would require the abolition of capitalism.
Typically, if output growth slows down, socio-economic inequality (as measured, e.g., by the Gini coefficient) increases.
that Marx disregarded in his construction of reproduction schemes when he modelled the circulation of capital (through the constant transformations of money-capital into production-capital and commodity-capital and vice versa).
At any time, a fraction of the population is not working or "economically active" (children, students, the sick and disabled, the unemployed, volunteer workers, housewives, pensioners, idlers, etc.
In the worst case, an interruption in the normal reproduction process triggers a sequence of disturbances, a chain reaction, which spreads from some branches of production to the whole economy, meaning that products are left unsold and that producers receive insufficient income to pay their bills.
If certain quantitative assumptions are made about the growth rates of different sectors and about capital compositions, it can be proved that certain disproportions must necessarily develop.
But in reality, the economic reproduction process could be interrupted or break down for all kinds of reasons (including non-economic causes, such as wars or disasters).
If vastly more capital assets are created than are invested in production, one cannot explain economic crises simply in terms of disproportionalities in the sphere of production; one has to look at the process of capital accumulation as a whole, which includes the financial system, non-productive assets, and real estate.
These debt crises signal that serious misallocations of capital have occurred, which impact negatively on economic reproduction.
But, as Marx would presumably argue, what makes a profit is not necessarily what people really need, and therefore the possibility exists that profit making may undermine the most basic conditions for economic reproduction, including the supply of food and clean water, sanitation, adequate shelter, schooling, health care, and the like.
If, for example, foreign investors invested in a country's essential infrastructure, a falling currency exchange rate some years later might wipe out the profits they could get.
Since roughly the 16th century, much of this domestic labor has been made the responsibility of women, through various developments put in motion by powerful institutions in the transition period from feudalism to capitalism.
[35] One of the principal inventors of modern national accounts, Simon Kuznets, did at one time suggest that the value of household labour should be estimated as a standard measure, even just for the sake of objectivity about the economy, but that argument was rejected.
He stated: "The productive activities of housewives and other family members, rendered within the family circle…are an important complement to the market-eventuating process in supplying goods to ultimate consumers, and should be considered in any attempt to evaluate the net product of the social system in terms of satisfying wants with scarce means.
[37] His calculations suggested that in the United States, the value of unpaid household work declined from about 45% of conventional Gross National Product in 1945 to about 33% in 1981.