Introduction

Abstract

The descriptive framework of an economy with a decentralized and disaggregated market structure – as observed in most Western monetary economies – is characterized by dominant private ownership of individual economic agents. They interact in markets together with central organizations of significant size such as governments or central banks which represent the institutional elements of empirical economies with markets. They serve as the explanatory framework for the corresponding abstractions used in the theoretical building blocks of a macroeconomic model of an economy as laid out by general equilibrium theory of private ownership economies in the sense of Arrow and Debreu (see Arrow, 1951; Debreu, 1959; Arrow & Hahn, 1971) and extensions thereof (following Keynes, 1936; Hicks, 1939; Patinkin, 1965, and others).