SEMAINE D'ÉTUDE SUR LE ROLE DE L’ ANALYSE ECONOMETRIQUE ETC. can be written, on the assumption that plants have a fixed life- span, in the form (IV 14 . I2) 2) y s£-- ll pa! st 01 de (T4 a* JF x) À In this equation, y, and /, denote respectively the net output of, and labour employed by, industry s at time #; v*, is the investment undertaken by industry s at time t expressed in wage units, and r*, is the initial rate of return on plant which comes into operation in industry s in year t; and a*, and b*, are parameters. The integration spans a period of © years equal to the fixed life spans of the plants. We have already seen, when discussing SAM, that the assumption of fixed life-spans is not satisfactory because actual life-spans depend on economic conditions. We can allow for this by integrating over an interval which is different from year to year and which for each year is chosen so that a plant 1s assumed to be scrapped only when the real wage becomes such that the value added by the plant would be less than the wage bill, even if it were operating at full capacity. This can be expressed by writing (IV. 12) as the functional (IV. 1)) i - * ) d= where R,(#) is the set of values of 7 which satisfy the no-scrap ping requirement at time /# in industry s. We are only now assembling the data necessary to estimate a*, b*, and R,(f). So in the preliminary estimates for 1970 given in [5] we had to adopt a simpler approach based on [32]. Let us now drop the subscript s. Let Ay denote the increase in capacity net output in a particular industry in a particular [1] Stone - pag. 47