Author: Maurice Lamontagne

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9780888627131

From the back cover: Maurice Lamontagne reveals the workings of three types of cycles: the short-term "inventory", cycle, lasting about forty months; the intermediate "investment" cycle, lasting seven to ten years; and the "long wave," which some theorists say last bottomed out in the 1930s. Each cycle has different causes, effects and urgent policy requirements, yet too often they are overlooked or lumped together. Governments and economists are preoccupited with short-term fluctuations that see the economy apparently picking up one year, then declining the next - while all along, the root social and technological causes of the economy's sluggishness aren't addressed. Lanontagne chronicles Canada's attempts to respond to short- and medium-term business cycles, and focuses on the implications of the long wave cycle for Canada. Long waves have been generated by technological innovations that coincided with a hospitable socio-political environment. We are now in a period when the economy built on "third wave" breakthroughs in transportation, communication and electricity in the 1890s is in decline, yet powerful vested interests are preventing a full transition to the infant technologies of the 1950s and 1960s: computers, new energy sources, genetic engineering and the space and ocean industries.