LAVOISIER, Antoine-Laurent de.

£1,250 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Resultats extraits d'un ouvrage intitule: de la richesse territoriale du royaume de France. Second edition (first 1791) of Lavoisier's most important contribution as an economist, "a milestone in the history of economic science and national statistics and accounting" (Poirier, p. 266). The work was reprinted after the Terror, to which Lavoisier famously fell victim, in Collection de divers ouvrages d'Arithmétique politique (1797)."De la richesse territoriale... de France, which was printed in 1791 by order of the National Assembly, constitutes an extract from a larger work on which Lavoisier had been engaged since 1784 in an effort to complete and verify an analysis of national income undertaken by Dupont de Nemours. Lavoisier's main argument is that the monetary valuation of national income from different sources leads to double counting; that the only method exempt from such difficulties is that based on an estimate of annual consumption, since exports and imports in France balance one another; and that in estimating consumption allowance must be made for the variation in the budgets of different social classes. Thus he estimated that the annual per capita income of the poorest families is from 60 livres to 70 livres, but he set the value of average per capita income at 110 livres, a figure admittedly similar to that of Quesnay in his Philosophie rurale (1763)... The net national income, computed by estimating the net revenue in the various branches of agriculture, he put a

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