Development is a dialectic relationship between people’s empowerment, social rules and norms and the surrounding economic structures. People’s empowerment ranks very high in development debate, but unfortunately the relationships with social rules and economic structures and indeed with historical conditions is often neglected. Agenda 2030 approved by the UN in September 2015 highlights three aspects of sustainability: economic, social and environmental and it includes 17 goals with 169 targets and 241 indicators.

By making use of the approach of classical political economists from Petty, to Quesnay, to Smith and Marx the paper highlights the role of economic structures and rules in relation to social progress. The views of these authors on the working of the economic systems allows a wider interpretation of reproduction and of sustainability and should be crucial in putting the development perspective into a more realistic framework.

Four main reproduction cycles can be described. Petty allows to describe the main features  of a ‘universal reproduction cycle’, urc. With Quesnay and Smith the economy becomes much more concerned with the increase of national wealth;  the accumulation of means of production different from wages become extremely important, this correspond to an ‘growth oriented reproduction cycle’ gorc. In Marx we have a ‘capitalistic reproduction cycle’, crc, in which means of production and technology assume a dominant role. Thanks to these contributions we can then describe a ‘sustainable reproduction cycle’, src. In it not only commodities appear both as inputs and as outputs, but natural resources and labour too have to be accounted for also as outcomes of the production process. Moreover the ‘sustainable reproduction cycle’ requires that the process of transformation of inputs into outputs should take place according to the same three dimensions of sustainability indicated above, which is hardly compatible with the capitalistic reproduction cycle.

This conclusion is reinforced when the financial system enters the picture and we have a ‘financial reproduction cycle’, frc, which reinforces the tendency of the ‘capitalistic reproduction cycle’ towards a situation of oligopolistic competition. This condition is characterised by large power imbalances in the distribution of income and in investment decisions. This  far away from anything which can be regarded as a sustainable development.