Kondratieff Cause: terms of trade and migration
First published: 2004
Brief summary
CRI Kondratieff page includes discussion of terms of trade, import/export prices and migration in New Zealand.
Article
Demographics
When I first did economic modelling on computers in 1977 I was not looking for cycles but rather for regression equations that would allow future values of economic variables to be estimated for businesses to assist in decision making. I was rather surprised to find a bunch of cycles jump out at me in my results. One of these was a very long cycle which only had a single wave in the data period I was using.
This long wave was connected to a number of different things, but the most relevant to its cause seemed to be the variations in demographics. The birth rate was lower in the times when major recessions occured and higher when the economy was stable. These birth rate fluctuations affected the whole age distribution of the population, meaning that lumps of people with similar ages exist until those people die of old age. The most recent lump is called the post war (WW II) baby boom.
As well as fluctuations in demographics and prices, this wave showed up in the New Zealand economy that I was studying in terms of trade, which is the relation between import and export prices, and in migration rates.
Additional summary
The remainder discusses demographic causes of the Kondratieff cycle, capital formation, migration, employment and long-wave timing.
Source details and credits
- Source / publisher: Cycles Research Institute
- Source type: Webpage
- URL type: WWW
- Credits: Cycles Research Institute
- URL: https://cyclesresearchinstitute.org/subjects/cycles-economy/kondratieff-cause/