Long-wave rhythms: The British case

This dissertation investigates whether or not there have been Kondratiev waves and Kuznets cycles in the history of British economic development, reassesses Kondratiev's thesis that long-waves of prices have been consistent for the world's major capitalist economies, and examines the Cairncross-Thomas argument that U.S. and British growth moved in inverse rhythms between 1840 and World War I.; The methodology employed is dynamic graphic analysis, using moving averages to determine whether there have been long-wave rhythms, exploration of nonlinear dynamics to establish whether the rhythms display "deterministic chaos," and cobweb formulations to explore whether growth and prices are synchronized.; The analysis led me to resolve a number of important questions about the rhythmic upswings and downturns of prices and economic growth of Great Britain: (1) Approximately half-century long Kondratiev waves in prices can be identified more clearly after the Industrial Revolution, but it was Toynbee's 110-115 year "Great Power War Cycles" that were identified over the entire period from 1661 to the present. (2) Quarter-century long Kuznets growth cycles appear after 1830. (3) No inverse rhythms were evident between the U.S. and British economies for the period 1840-1914, contradicting the hypotheses of Cairncross and Thomas. Rather, the British economy was much stabler than that of the U.S., as Berry argued. More generally, the world's core industrial economies, while they display long-wave rhythms, display much less fluctuation than peripheral raw material producers. (4) Global synchronization of the price and growth movements of the world's economies has emerged since the Second World War.