Business Cycles and Geography

Capitalism is a society and economy notorious for its instability over time. The history of capitalist economies is replete with boom and bust periods, epochs of rapid growth, high profits, and low unemployment followed by periods of crisis, economic depression, bankruptcies, and high unemployment. The Great Depression of the 1930s was the most spectacular example of capitalism's anarchical and self-destructive tendency. There are many theories of capitalism's cyclical behavior, including, for example, those from Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, and Simon Kuznets. Taming business cycles has long been a central objective of Keynesian economic policy. This entry focuses on what is perhaps the most famous form of business cycles, Kondratiev waves, as well as how geographers have linked multiple cycles of investment and disinvestment to the ...