Technical Innovation, Diffusion, and Long Cycles of Economic Development

During the last postwar boom in the 1950s and 1960s, there was relatively little interest in the idea of long cycles of capitalist economic development. But in the last few years there has been a resurgence of discussion and debate among economists about this phenomenon, and an increasing amount of empirical research both on the historical evidence and on contemporary aspects of the worldwide slowdown in economic growth. This chapter discusses a neoSchumpeterian interpretation of long cycles, which is based on a research project on “Technical Change and Employment” (TEMPO) carried out at the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, England, from 1979 to 1984. In two books (Freeman et al.,1982; Freeman and Soete, 1987), I and my colleagues have attempted to show the connection between long cycles and long-term trends in unemployment. This chapter deals with more general problems of long-wave theory.