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Business cycle
Business cycles are intervals of general expansion followed by recession in economic performance. The changes in economic activity that characterize business cycles have important implications for the welfare of the general population, government institutions, and private sector firms.
There are many definitions of a business cycle. The simplest defines recessions as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. More satisfactory classifications are provided first by including more economic indicators and second by looking for more data patterns than the two quarter definition. In the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research oversees a Business Cycle Dating Committee that defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."
Business cycles are usually thought of as medium-term evolution. They are less related to long-term trends, coming from slowly-changing factors like technological advances. Further, a one period change, that is unusual over the course of one or two years, is often relegated to noise; an example is a worker strike or an isolated period of severe weather.
The individual episodes of expansion/recession occur with changing duration and intensity over time. Typically their periodicity has a wide range from around 2 to 10 years.
There are many sources of business cycle movements such as rapid and significant changes in the price of oil or variation in consumer sentiment that affects overall spending in the macroeconomy and thus investment and firms' profits. Usually such sources are unpredictable in advance and can be viewed as random shocks to the cyclical pattern, as happened during the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first systematic exposition of economic crises, in opposition to the existing theory of economic equilibrium, was the 1819 Nouveaux Principes d'économie politique by Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi. Prior to that point classical economics had either denied the existence of business cycles, blamed them on external factors, notably war, or only studied the long term. Sismondi found vindication in the Panic of 1825, which was the first unarguably international economic crisis, occurring in peacetime.[citation needed]
Sismondi and his contemporary Robert Owen, who expressed similar but less systematic thoughts in 1817 Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor, both identified the cause of economic cycles as overproduction and underconsumption, caused in particular by wealth inequality. They advocated government intervention and socialism, respectively, as the solution. This work did not generate interest among classical economists, though underconsumption theory developed as a heterodox branch in economics until being systematized in Keynesian economics in the 1930s.
Sismondi's theory of periodic crises was developed into a theory of alternating cycles by Charles Dunoyer, and similar theories, showing signs of influence by Sismondi, were developed by Johann Karl Rodbertus. Periodic crises in capitalism formed the basis of the theory of Karl Marx, who further claimed that these crises were increasing in severity and, on the basis of which, he predicted a communist revolution.[citation needed] Though only passing references in Das Kapital (1867) refer to crises, they were extensively discussed in Marx's posthumously published books, particularly in Theories of Surplus Value. In Progress and Poverty (1879), Henry George focused on land's role in crises – particularly land speculation – and proposed a single tax on land as a solution.
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Business cycle
Business cycles are intervals of general expansion followed by recession in economic performance. The changes in economic activity that characterize business cycles have important implications for the welfare of the general population, government institutions, and private sector firms.
There are many definitions of a business cycle. The simplest defines recessions as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. More satisfactory classifications are provided first by including more economic indicators and second by looking for more data patterns than the two quarter definition. In the United States, the National Bureau of Economic Research oversees a Business Cycle Dating Committee that defines a recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."
Business cycles are usually thought of as medium-term evolution. They are less related to long-term trends, coming from slowly-changing factors like technological advances. Further, a one period change, that is unusual over the course of one or two years, is often relegated to noise; an example is a worker strike or an isolated period of severe weather.
The individual episodes of expansion/recession occur with changing duration and intensity over time. Typically their periodicity has a wide range from around 2 to 10 years.
There are many sources of business cycle movements such as rapid and significant changes in the price of oil or variation in consumer sentiment that affects overall spending in the macroeconomy and thus investment and firms' profits. Usually such sources are unpredictable in advance and can be viewed as random shocks to the cyclical pattern, as happened during the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic.
The first systematic exposition of economic crises, in opposition to the existing theory of economic equilibrium, was the 1819 Nouveaux Principes d'économie politique by Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi. Prior to that point classical economics had either denied the existence of business cycles, blamed them on external factors, notably war, or only studied the long term. Sismondi found vindication in the Panic of 1825, which was the first unarguably international economic crisis, occurring in peacetime.[citation needed]
Sismondi and his contemporary Robert Owen, who expressed similar but less systematic thoughts in 1817 Report to the Committee of the Association for the Relief of the Manufacturing Poor, both identified the cause of economic cycles as overproduction and underconsumption, caused in particular by wealth inequality. They advocated government intervention and socialism, respectively, as the solution. This work did not generate interest among classical economists, though underconsumption theory developed as a heterodox branch in economics until being systematized in Keynesian economics in the 1930s.
Sismondi's theory of periodic crises was developed into a theory of alternating cycles by Charles Dunoyer, and similar theories, showing signs of influence by Sismondi, were developed by Johann Karl Rodbertus. Periodic crises in capitalism formed the basis of the theory of Karl Marx, who further claimed that these crises were increasing in severity and, on the basis of which, he predicted a communist revolution.[citation needed] Though only passing references in Das Kapital (1867) refer to crises, they were extensively discussed in Marx's posthumously published books, particularly in Theories of Surplus Value. In Progress and Poverty (1879), Henry George focused on land's role in crises – particularly land speculation – and proposed a single tax on land as a solution.