In 1986, following the collaboration which led to Ricardo, Marx, Sraffa, Alan Freeman and Paolo Giussani worked with Ernest Mandel on a project to provide data on the growth of poverty in Europe. We concentrated on Germany, working with Peter Bartelsheimer and Harald Wolff to use the very comprehensive data available from German sources, and produced a chapter originally intended for the book by Anwar Shaikh and E. Ahmed Tonak later published as Measuring the Growth of Nations. I have no electronic version of the English text, but Paolo did eventually circulate an Italian version, and I believe, published it.
The Italian version is provided here. This research allowed me to begin studying the effect of the state on distribution, leading to what was later published in Paul Dunne’s Quantitative Marxism. Shaikh and Tonak’s work, and our research, also led Giussani and I to embark on a systematic study of the central and still-neglected topic of productive and unproductive labour. I retain some unpublished texts from this period but they are not in electronic form. I have returned to the topic from time to time and hope to summarise the results in the second volume of my proposed trilogy.