Transformational Growth and the Business Cycle

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.