Introduction

Abstract

The economic performance of most Western economies in the last decade has triggered renewed interest in research on the so-called Kondratieff long waves, which are supposed to reflect regular fluctuations in economic life with a wave length of 45–60 years. According to the time schedule of the Kondratieff wave, the period from the 1890s up to about World War I, and that from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, would have to be considered as prosperity phases of the long wave. The crises phenomena of the last decade would be consistent with the Western economies having entered a new downturn of the long wave, comparable with the long wave downturn of the interwar period. Clearly, if one were to extrapolate that scheme in a very simplistic and mechanistic way, it would be tempting to conclude that a new revival of the world economy will occur between the late 1980s and the middle 1990s.