KUZNETS (Simon).
Secular Movements in Production and Prices: Their Nature and Their Bearing Upon Cyclical Fluctuations.
Kuznets’s second book, following on from his doctoral thesis Cyclical Fluctuations (1926), and later followed by Seasonal Variations in Industry and Trade (1933). “Together these three works analyse the cyclical, seasonal, and secular trends in economic data, and they describe the nature, causes, and propagation of business cycles. They also relate business cycles to certain long-term cycles that Kuznets named ‘secondary secular movements’ (also known as ‘Kuznets cycles’) and to seasonal movements. Kuznets’s key innovation was to describe the process of the propagation of cycles and to locate their generation and continuation in lags and discontinuities in the response of one sector of the economy to changes in another sector. The discussion of long-term cycles is also significant for connecting changes in population (which had been a neglected endogenous variable until then) with changes in other economic variables, such as consumption, investment, capital formation, immigration, and foreign trade” (American National Biography).
Kuznets won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971 for ‘his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development’.
