Transformational Growth and the Business Cycle

by Edward Nell (Editor)

Overview

This book examines the concept of Transformational Growth from a number of different historical and geographical perspectives. Transformational Growth sees the economy as an evolving system in which the market selects and finances innovations, changing the character of costs and affecting the pattern of market adjustment. This creates the possibility that markets will work differently in particular historical periods.
This book explores market adjustments in two distinct historical periods, 1870-1914 and 1945-the present. The book focuses on six countries: USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Japan and Argentina. In all cases the earlier period, dominated by craft-based technologies, proves to be the one in which markets adjust through a weakly stabilising price mechanism. By contrast, in the later period, in all cases, with the exception of Argentina, there is no evidence of such a price mechanism, but in its place can be seen a multiplier-accelerator process which, arguably, reflects a change of technology to mass-production.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780415148559
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/11/1997
Series:	Routledge Studies in Transformational Growth Ser.
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Edward Nell is Matthew B. Smith Professor of Economics at the New School for Social Research, New York. He is the author of Making Sense of a Changing Economy, (Routledge, 1996).

Table of Contents

PART I The idea of Transformational Growth 1 From craft to mass production The changing character of market adjustment 2 Methods and methodology in historical macroeconomics PART II Industrial history 3 The US economy during World War II 4 Transformational Growth and the merger movement from 1895 to 1904 Some theoretical, empirical and historical evidence PART III Studies of stylized facts 5 Transformational Growth and the business cycle 6 UK Business cycles Stylized facts and the marginal cost/marginal productivity debate 7 Product wages and the elasticities of effective demand in the United States during the old and the new business cycles 8 Price v. output adjustments The changing nature of the business cycle in Germany, 1871–1989 9 Transformational Growth in Japan 10 Argentina Transformational Growth in the absence of the new cycle 11 Canada and Argentina A comparison PART IV Implications for economic analysis 12 On Transformational Growth 13 Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

Thirteen closely related essays compose an empirical exploration of the concept of transformational growth, which sees the economy as an evolving system in which various factors interact differently in particular historical periods. They explore market adjustment in two distinct historical periods, 1870-1914, and 1945 to the present, focusing on the US, the UK, Canada, Germany, Japan, and Argentina. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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