S t u d I o s d e

Estudios de Economía Aplicada, 2010: 577-594 

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 Vol. 28-3 

580 

activities, followed by similarly general recessions, contractions, and revivals which 

merge into the expansion phase of the next cycle; in duration, business cycles vary 

from more than one year to ten or twelve years; they are not divisible into shorter 

cycles of similar characteristics with amplitudes approximating their own”. 

According to A.F. Burns (1951): “Business cycles are not merely fluctuations in 

aggregate economic activity. The critical feature that distinguishes them from the 

commercial convulsions of earlier centuries or from the seasonal and other short 

term variations of our own age is that the fluctuations are widely diffused over the 

economy 

⎯

its industry, its commercial dealings, and its tangles of finance. The 

economy of the western world is a system of closely interrelated parts. He who 

would understand business cycles must master the workings of an economic system 

organized largely in a network of free enterprises searching for profit. The 

problem of how business cycles come about is therefore inseparable from the 

problem of how a capitalist economy functions”. 

In 1954 Schumpeter, stated that an economic cycle has four stages: (i) expan-

sion (increase in production and prices, low interests rates); (ii) crisis (stock 

exchanges crash and multiple bankruptcies of firms occur); (iii) recession (drops in 

prices and in output, high interests rates); and (iv) recovery (stocks recover because 

of the fall in prices and incomes). In this model, recovery and prosperity are 

associated with increases in productivity, consumer confidence aggregate demand, 

and prices. He also proposed a typology of business cycles according to their 

periodicity, so that a number of particular cycles were named after their discoverers 

or proposers: (1) The Kitchin or inventory cycle lasting 3 to5 years (named after 

Joseph Kitchin,1923); (2) the Juglar economic cycle of 7-11 years ;(3) the Kuznets 

cycle of 15-25 years (named after Simon Kuznets,1930); and (4) the Kondratiev 

wave or technological cycle of 45-60 years (named after Nikolai Kondratiev,1935). 

In the United States, it is generally accepted that the national Bureau of 

Economic Research (NBER) is the final arbiter of the dates of the peaks and 

troughs of the business cycle. An expansion is the period from a trough to a peak, 

and a recession as the period from a peak to a trough. The NBER identifies a 

recession as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, 

lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, 

employment, industrial production". 

The explanation of fluctuations in aggregate economic activity is one of the 

primary concerns of macroeconomics. One of the frameworks for explaining such 

fluctuations is the Keynesian economics according to which, business cycles reflect 

the possibility that the economy may reach short-run equilibrium at levels below or 

above full employment. If the economy is operating with less than full 

employment, i.e., with high unemployment, Keynesian theory states that monetary 

policy and fiscal policy can have a positive role to play in smoothing the 

fluctuations of the business cycle. 

Within mainstream economics, the debate over external (exogenous) versus 

internal (endogenous) causes of the economic cycle is centuries long, with the 

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