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Business cycle theory is normally described as having evolved out of a previous tradition of writers focusing exclusively on crises. In this account, the turning point is seen as residing in Clément Juglar's contribution on commercial crises and their periodicity. It is well known that the champion of this view is Schumpeter, who propagated it on several occasions. The same author, however, pointed to a number of other writers who, before and at the same time as Juglar, stressed one or another of the aspects for which Juglar is credited primacy, including the recognition of periodicity and the identification of endogenous elements enabling the recognition of crises as a self-generating phenomenon. There is indeed a vast literature, both primary and secondary, relating to the debates on crises and fluctuations around the middle of the nineteenth century, from which it is apparent that Juglar's book Des Crises Commerciales et de leur Retour Périodique en France, en Angleterre et aux États-Unis (originally published in 1862 and very much revised and enlarged in 1889) did not come out of the blue but was one of the products of an intellectual climate inducing the thinking of crises not as unrelated events but as part of a more complex phenomenon consisting of recurring crises related to the development of the commercial world – an interpretation corroborated by the almost regular occurrence of crises at about 10-year intervals.

Historians of economic thought have begun to reintegrate “un-Austrian” Austrians back into discussions of Austrian Economics, yet many scholars have argued that the Austrian School dissolved after emigration, with only Mises and his followers left to carry on the legacy. This chapter argues that a renewed focus on the networks established by the Austrians themselves, before and after emigration, reveals a distinctly different picture of Austrian Economics. Focusing on their shared interest in international trade theory and business cycle theory and their continued contributions to economic methodology, we see the émigré Austrians advancing Austrian ideas while also reconstituting and elaborating new Austrian affiliations. Ultimately, we find ourselves in agreement with Herbert Furth that Austrian Economics is far broader than Hayek, Mises, and their acolytes would have it, and that it is vital to understand and preserve this more diverse tradition by investigating more closely the works of Haberler, Machlup, Morgenstern, and others.

We consider whether there has been a gradual decoupling of the Australian business cycle from its trading partners in Europe and North America and a closer convergence toward its trading partners in Asia. We set up a dynamic latent factor model to estimate common dynamic components or factors for the real GDP growth rate of 19 countries. From variance decomposition over the 1991–2009 sample, we find that a global factor contributed the most in explaining Australian output growth variations, followed by a European factor, an Asian factor, and finally a North American factor. However, the correlation between Australian output growth movements and the Asian business cycle factor evolved from negative and small to positive and large after 2002. The European and North American factors were negatively correlated with Australian output growth for most of the sample period before turning positive in the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. This evidence supports the hypothesis that the Australian economy has decoupled to some extent from Europe, was not much coupled with North America except insofar as the United States drove the global factor, and has increasingly become positively coupled with Asia.

Standard measures of business cycle comovement, based on correlation coefficients, are very sensitive to the phase of the business cycle, as well as to regional crises. Adjusting for these factors overturns the empirical result that Asia-Pacific economies are becoming decoupled from the United States over time. An alternative, intuitive, measure of business cycle comovement is proposed, based on the difference between output growth rates adjusted for its long-run average. The new measure suggests that Asia-Pacific economies are becoming more strongly coupled with the United States over time.

The current security trade settlement life cycle presents several inefficiencies derived from intermediaries involved in the transaction between buyers and sellers. This chapter examines distributed ledger technology (DLT), the underlying technology of all blockchain applications, including trade settlements. It also reviews the implications of using blockchain in trade settlements for cryptoassets. Emerging blockchain technology provides investors, exchanges, regulators, and countless potential intermediaries with the most up-to-date technology with the highest efficiency, transparency, credibility, and automation enabled by smart contracts. Smart contracts allow an ecosystem to manage the process of trade settlements starting from execution to clearing and then settlement. These contracts reduce reconciliation and recordkeeping costs and streamline repetitive processes present in today’s trade settlement system. The chapter highlights the benefits of implementing DLT in financial markets globally in all trading aspects, including cryptoassets.

This chapter aims at introducing the key themes in two entries written by Tadeusz Kowalik for the Encyclopaedia Einaudi. These two long essays represent further developments of Kowalik's interpretation of the nature of capital and the cause and consequences of cyclical developments in capitalism. While the chapter is divided into two sections corresponding to the two entries, at the same time it tries to highlight the structural method of the author for which the categories of capital and crisis are historically, economically and politically entangled.

This chapter enquires into the contribution of two British writers, Herbert Somerton Foxwell and Henry Riverdale Grenfell, who elaborated upon the hints provided by Jevons towards a description of long waves in the oscillations of prices. Writing two decades after Jevons, they witnessed the era of high prices turning into the great depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the causes of which they saw in the end of bimetallism. Not only did they take up Jevons’s specific explanation of the long fluctuations, but they also based their discussion upon graphical representation of data and incorporated in their treatment a specific trait (the superposition principle) of the ‘waves’ metaphor emphasized by the Manchester statisticians in the 1850s and 1860s. Their contribution is also interesting for their understanding of crises versus depressions at the time of the emergence of the interpretation of oscillations as a cycle, which they have only partially grasped – as distinct from the approach of later long wave theorists.

Soon after beginning operations, the Federal Reserve established a nationwide network for collecting information about the economy. In 1919, the Fed began tabulating data by about retail sales, which it viewed as a fundamental measure of consumption. From 1920 until 1929, the Federal Reserve published data about retail sales each month by Federal Reserve district, but ceased to do so after 1929. It continued to compile monthly data on retail sales by reserve district, but this data remained in house. We collected these in-house reports from the archives of the Board of Governors and constructed a consistent series on retail trade at the district level. The new series enhances our understanding of economic trends during the Roaring ‘20s and Great Depression.

With competitive rivalry eroding traditional product differentiation, legally protected brands have gradually become one of the most prized assets of multinational corporations. The defense of domestic brand shares and the expansion of well-known brands into new foreign markets have become important tasks of corporate managers. Yet, to date, there is no clear recognition of this increasing role of brands in the economic theory of international trade. This paper explores the implications of strong brands for intra-industry trade, for Vernon’s product-cycle model and for international trade overall. On balance, the ascent of global brands is shown to raise trade in standardized products, exacerbate the shift toward intra-firm trade, and sustain the dominance by large centralized multinationals.