1. TRADITIONAL TREATMENT OF LABOUR IN MACRO PRODUCTION FUNCTIONS

In macro production functions labour appears as one single factor of production, sometimes accompanied by another factor, education, based either on time series or cross section data. The variable labour is usually introduced as the quantity of labour. This quantity is commonly measured by the number of workers employed, some-times corrected for changes in the number of hours worked; quality differences between groups of employees are hardly brought into the picture. As a consequence, the light shed on distribution problems with the aid of production functions only concerns income distri-bution over broad factors such as land, labour and capital. One of the well-known initial findings was that with a Cobb-Douglas pro-duction function the share of labour in total income is equal to the exponent given to labour. This exponent has not greatly changed over time, implying that labour income before redistribution consti-tutes almost a constant portion of national income. The share per income recipient can change, however, if the number of workers does not change proportionally with the total population engaged in production. * Professor of the Economics of Centrally Planned Systems and Development Pro-gramming, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, tile Netherlands.- It affords the Board of Editors great pleasure to publish this paper by one of their members. This gives the Board the opportunity, also on behalf of the readers of De Economist. to congratulate Professor Tinbergen most cordially upon his 70th birthday, which he celebrated on 12t