Kondratiev wave Totally Explained

Everything about Kondratieff Cycle totally explained

Also widely printed as Kondratieff.
In heterodox economics, Kondratiev waves—also called grand supercycles, surges, long waves, or K-waves—are described as regular, sinusoidal cycles in the modern (capitalist) world economy. Fifty to sixty years in length, the cycles consist of alternating periods between high sectoral growth and periods of slower growth. This business cycle is more visible in international production data than in individual national economies and concerns output rather than prices. Some economists divide the Kondratiev wave into two 'seasons', namely, the Kondratiev Fall and the later part, the Kondratiev Winter. A bull market is associated with 'fall' and a bear market with 'winter'. More common today is the division into four periods with a turning point (collapse) between the first and second two.
The Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev (1892-1938) was the first to bring these observations international attention in his book "The Major Economic Cycles" (1925) alongside other works written in the same decade. Two Dutchmen, J. van Gelderen (1891-1940) and Samuel de Wolff previously argued for the existence of 50- to 60-year cycles in 1913. However, only recently has the work of Wolff and Gelderen been translated from Dutch to reach a wider audience.

Others

Early on, four schools of thought emerged as to why capitalist economies have these long waves. These schools of thought revolved around innovations, capital investment, war and capitalist crisis. According to the innovation theory, these waves arise from the bunching of basic innovations that launch technological revolutions that in turn create leading industrial or commercial sectors. Kondratiev's ideas were taken up by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s. The theory hypothesized the existence of very long-run macroeconomic and price cycles, originally estimated to last 50-54 years.
   Since the inception of the theories, various studies have expanded the range of possible cycles, finding longer or shorter cycles in the data. The Marxist scholar Ernest Mandel revived interest in long wave theory with his 1964 essay predicting the end of the long boom after five years and in his Alfred Marshall lectures in 1979. However, in Mandel's theory, there are no long "cycles", only distinct epochs of faster and slower growth spanning 20-25 years.
   Long wave theory isn't accepted by most academic economists, but it's one of the bases of innovation-based, development, and evolutionary economics, for example the main heterodox stream in economics. Among economists who accept it, there has been no universal agreement about the start and the end years of particular waves. This points to another criticism of the theory: that it amounts to seeing patterns in a mass of statistics that aren't really there. Moreover, there's a lack of agreement over the cause of this phenomenon.
   Most cycle theorists agree, however, with the "Schumpeter-Freeman-Perez" paradigm of five waves so far since the industrial revolution, and the sixth one to come. These five cycles are

The Industrial Revolution--1771
The Age of Steam and Railways--1829
The Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering--1875
The Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production--1908
The Age of Information and Telecommunications--1971

According to this theory, we're currently at the turning-point of the 5th Kondratiev. Some scholars, particularly Immanuel Wallerstein, argue that cycles of global war are tied to Capitalist Long Waves. Major, highly-destructive wars tend to begin just prior to an output upswing.

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