According to Alfred Marshall, the element of time is the most important and difficult aspect to deal with in the economic analysis. Accordingly, he has placed the concept of time at the core of his economic reasoning, and he has developed a number of analytical tools that allow including time in his analytical framework: most notably, the cœteris paribus pound, the representative firm, and the distinction between short and long periods. However, he encountered an insurmountable impasse when dealing with the real elapsing of time in his static framework: the solution proposed in his Principles of Economics remained, for him, highly unsatisfactory, problematic, and incomplete. The real elapsing of time—unavoidable in his reflections—copes very badly indeed with his analytical construction based on equilibrium. The continuity of time is the element of the Marshallian analysis most quickly criticized and rejected. After him, in the economic analysis, time gradation was rigorously divided into “short” and “long” periods, whereas Marshall’s concerns for the continuity of real time were banished from what was considered a “rigorous” analysis. The main aims of this paper are to frame Marshall’s distinction between short and long periods and to underline those aspects of his contribution that were lost or were substantially simplified in later literature.

Joseph A. Schumpeter’s theory of economic development analyzes how growth and cycle dynamics intertwine. The process of creative destruction plays an essential role in those dynamics: embodying a cleansing effect, it has a clear, beneficial impact on long-run development. For that reason, and also for some of his famous (and provocative) non-interventionist statements, Schumpeter is generally interpreted as a pure liquidationist. This paper contests this rather simplistic view and shows that Schumpeter not only expressed much more nuanced positions as far as practical economic issues were concerned, but also that his views on economic policy were rooted in his earlier contributions before the Great Depression, attesting that Schumpeter’s view on economic policy was consistent over time.

This paper re-examines Dennis Robertson’s ‘real’ business cycle (RBC) theory outlined in his 1915 A Study in Industrial Fluctuation. Even if, for Robertson, cycles find their origin and respond to oscillations in entrepreneurs’ “rational inducement” to invest, in opposition to RBC models in which every outcome is by construction an equilibrium outcome, Robertson discusses in a traditional way the short-run consequences of such exogenous technological shocks. There are no intertemporal equilibrium phenomena in the sense of the RBC approach; cycle theory is organized, for Robertson, around a Marshallian-defined center of gravity (or long-run equilibrium state of rest). For him, the real forces are represented by the gestation period of investment, but also by investment’s durability, its imperfect divisibility, and, allied with these, its intractability. These features of investment lead to excessive outlays upon capital investment, which ultimately depresses their marginal productivity. The inevitable and rational result is a downturn in the capital goods industries and the onset of a cycle.

Despite the transnational character of the Great Depression, there are few works in the interwar literature that deal with the propagation of business cycles across national borders and systemic risks of depression in the world economy. Two notable exceptions are Hans Neisser’s Some International Aspects of the Business Cycle (1936) and chapter 12 in Gottfried Haberler’s Prosperity and Depression ([1937] 1964), which carries the heading “International Aspects of Business Cycles.” Both works differ substantially from each other and from the modern way of thinking about international business cycles in open economy macroeconomics. Haberler’s and Neisser’s approaches help to identify relevant issues that have been lost from sight in modern open economy macroeconomics.

It is now almost eighty years since Michal Kalecki published his formal mathematical model of the business cycle. In this paper, we want to examine the vision embedded in that early model and the writings he published at around the same time. Sections II and III center on Kalecki’s approach to local and global (in)-stability, and section IV suggests a simplified model designed to pinpoint key aspects of Kalecki’s thinking related to the issue of endogenous cycles, ‘class struggle,’ and growth.

This paper discusses the transition from a perspective in which the determination of income, output, and unemployment was seen as a part of the theory of the business cycle to one in which they are determined independently of the cycle, a transition that meant that the theory of output came to be more sharply separated from the theory of growth. In place of theories of the business cycle, which were rooted in structural changes associated with growth, business cycle theory came to be more of an adjunct to short-run theories. Whereas Arthur Cecil Pigou and John Maynard Keynes were already arguing in terms of the short run by the early 1930s, some American economists continued to think in terms of the business cycle until the very end of the 1930s. This paper shows that for Alvin Hansen and Paul Samuelson, both highly influential figures in postwar economics, the shift came about only because of the need to adduce structural factors to explain the recession of 1937–38 and wartime experience. The focus on income determination as the central macroeconomic problem in Samuelson’s textbook reflected the change in thinking that had happened during the 1940s.

During several decades and until the end of the 1990s, the theory of structural economic dynamics has been absent in the field of so-called mainstream economic analysis. The literature included only either empirically oriented contributions or developments that were related to so-called critical theoretical approaches of structural change. At the end of the twentieth century, however, mainstream economic theorists changed this situation and began to investigate the field of structural dynamics, often using the Solovian theory of economic growth. During the last two decades, they contributed to change substantially the state of the theory of structural change. This contribution first provides an assessment of the advances realized by these theorists. It then confronts these advances with the so-called alternative or critical theoretical approaches of structural dynamics—namely, Luigi Pasinetti’s contribution and ‘evolutionary’ approaches—in order to provide a more complete picture of structural dynamics in the short and the long run.