[The purpose of this article is to suggest and demonstrate a procedure for testing economy wide linear programming models.The suggested procedure applies the linear programming model to an historical period. In general, the model's optimal solution will not be identical to the actual historical solution. Differences between the model's optimal and the economy's actual solutions could be explained by alternative sets of hypotheses--on the one hand, market imperfections, and on the other hand, defects in the linear programming model. Ordinary statistical tests could then be applied in testing the alternative hypotheses. In order to demonstrate the procedure, a linear programming model designed for prescribing an optimal economic structure for the Greek economy during the period 1954-61 is presented and tested.]

This paper empirically tests the hypothesis that devaluation stimulates export and income growth. The historical period 1873-94 is utilized because it is relatively free of the simultaneous-equation bias which has plagued previous studies. During this period the price of silver relative to gold fell by about 50 percent, thereby implying a substantial devaluation by silver standard countries relative to gold standard countries. Support for the hypothesis is provided by evidence that exports and income grew significantly more rapidly in the former countries than in the latter ones.

I. Linkages, 335. — II. (Dis)Aggregation, 336. — III. A tempest in a teapot, 337. — IV. Conclusion, 342.

I. Consolidated I-O tables averaged for developed and less developed countries, 159. — II. Linkage indices, 161. — III. The Hirschman-compliance index and the extreme version of the linkage hypothesis, 165. — IV. The balanced-growth version of the linkage hypothesis, 167. — V. Summary' and conclusions, 171.

The choice between wage labor and sharecrop contracts is analyzed in a model that avoids both the pitfalls of previous models--inefficiency of sharecropping and indeterminacy--by introducing transactions costs with appropriate nonlinearities. Plantation data from the American South provide empirical support for the hypothesized nonlinearity in transactions costs and simultaneous determination of direct supervision and contractual choice.