Description
Book SynopsisThis major book extends Michal Kalecki’s investment cycle analysis into an integrated dynamic model of how levels of confidence experienced by entrepreneurs affect their decisions to invest.
The long-term, expensive and uncertain nature of investment projects inhibits decision makers’ confidence, making it susceptible to a wide range of factors. Incorporating behavioural and evolutionary analysis into a Kaleckian investment model, Jerry Courvisanos develops the concept of susceptibility which provides the foundation for an improved understanding of the empirically observed cyclical instability of capital accumulation. Historically based empirical patterns of cyclical manufacturing investment in capitalist economies are identified and related to how the nature of susceptibility alters over time. These alterations are shown to create different investment cycle patterns over evolving periods of economic development.
Drawing on this susceptibility cycle model, Jerry Courvisanos shows how corporate and governmental strategic planners can better design policies to mitigate the instability that investment exhibits. The result could be to diminish the aggravating effect that investment instability has on business cycles and employment in capitalist economies.
Trade Review’This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the determinants of business fixed investment behaviour and its fluctuations. . . A reader wanting to become acquainted with a Kaleckian-Keynesian approach to investment or business cycles would, I believe, find in this book a wonderful synthesis of the key ideas of this viewpoint. . . Courvisanos presents in this book an approach that should be given serious consideration.’- Tracy Mott,
The Economic JournalTable of ContentsContents: Preface Introduction: The Need for a Theory of Investment Cycles 2. Kaleckian Analysis of Investment 3. Investment under Uncertainty: Behavioural and Evolutionary Views 4. Institutional Behaviour of Firms 5. The Susceptibility Cycle: An Endogenous Model 6. Exogenous Factors Affecting Susceptibility 7. Long Run Empirical Patterns of Cyclical Investments 8. Policy Implications and Future Directions Bibliography Index
