Economic Growth and Business Cycles

In this important and original book, Professor Sylos Labini offers an analysis of growth that is at once theoretical, historical and statistical. The central aim of neoclassical economics has been to discover the equilibrium values of prices, incomes, employment and production. Economic Growth and Business Cycles, by contrast, seeks to understand the logic behind the movement of these quantities over time. Drawing upon a tradition in economics which dates from Adam Smith, while making use of modern analytical techniques, Sylos Labini views the process of growth as central to economic theory. Economic growth is seen not as a systematic increase of output conceived as an homogeneous aggregate, but rather as a process of structural change, affecting the composition of employment and bringing about changes in market forms, output, income distribution and the system of prices. Economic Growth and Business Cycles will be welcomed by students and teachers of economics who wish to become acquainted with an original approach to the process of growth.