Nikolai Kondratiev

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Nikolai Kondratiev : biography

4 March 1892 – 17 September 1938

Nikolai Dmitriyevich Kondratiev (in some sources also referred as Kondratieff, Russian: Никола́й Дми́триевич Кондра́тьев; 4 March 1892 – 17 September 1938) was a Russian economist, who was a proponent of the New Economic Policy (NEP), which promoted small private, free market enterprises in the Soviet Union. He is best known for proposing the theory that Western capitalist economies have long term (50 to 60 years) cycles of boom followed by depression. These business cycles are now called "Kondratiev waves".Vincent Barnett, , Encyclopedia of Russian History, 2004, at Encyclopedia.com.

Major works

book, paper

  • 1922 – The World Economy and its Conjunctures During and After the War
  • 1923 – "Some Controversial Questions Concerning the World Economy and Crisis (Answer to Our Critiques)"
  • 1924 – "On the Notion of Economic Statics, Dynamics and Fluctuations"
  • 1925 – The Major Economic Cycles
  • 1926a – "About the Question of the Major Cycles of the Conjuncture"
  • 1926b – "Problems of Forecasting"
  • 1928a – The Major Cycles of the Conjuncture
  • 1928b – "Dynamics of Industrial and Agricultural Prices (Contribution to the Theory of Relative Dynamics and Conjuncture)"
  • 1934 – "Main Problems of Economic Statics and Dynamics"

Life and times

Nikolai Dimitrievich Kondratiev was born on 4 March 1892 in the province of Kostroma, north of Moscow, into a peasant family.Grinin, L. E., Devezas, T., and Korotayev A. V. Introduction. Kondratieff’s Mystery. In Kondratieff Waves. Dimensions and Prospects at the Dawn of the 21st Century ed. by Grinin, L. E., Devezas, T., and Korotayev A. V. Volgograd: Uchitel. Pp. 5-22 He was tutored at the University of St. Petersburg before the 1917 Russian Revolution by Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky. A member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, his initial professional work was in the area of agricultural economics and statistics and the problem of food supplies. On 5 October 1917, at the age of 25, he was appointed Deputy Minister of Supply of the last Alexander Kerensky government, which lasted for only a few days.Francisco Louçã, , History of Political Economy, Spring 1999, 31(1): 169-205; Duke University Press, doi:10.1215/00182702-31-1-169

After the revolution, Kondratiev pursued academic research. In 1919, he was appointed to a teaching post at the Agricultural Academy of Peter the Great. In October 1920 he founded the Institute of Conjuncture, in Moscow. As its first director, he developed it into a large and respected institution with 51 researchers by 1923.Erik Buyst, , Encyclopedia of Modern Europe: Europe Since 1914: Encyclopedia of the Age of War and Reconstruction, Gale Publishing, via Highbeam, January 1, 2006.

In 1922 he published his first writing on long cycles., The World Economy and its Conjunctures During and After the War. His writing that capitalist economies were characterized by successions of expansion and decline contradicted the Marxist idea of the imminent collapse of capitalism.

In 1923, Kondratiev intervened in the debate about the "Scissors Crisis", following the general opinion of his colleagues. In 1923-5, he worked on a five-year plan for the development of Soviet agriculture. In 1924, after publishing his first book, presenting the first tentative version of his theory of major cycles, Kondratiev traveled to England, Germany, Canada and the United States, and visited several universities before returning to Russia. In 1925 he published his book The Major Economic Cycles which quickly was translated into German. A short form was published in 1935 in the Review of Economic Statistics and for a time his ideas became popular in the west, until eclipsed by those of John Maynard Keynes.

Kondratiev’s economic cycle theory held that there were long cycles of about fifty years. In the beginning of the cycle economies produce high cost capital goods and infrastructure investments creating new employment and income and a demand for consumer goods. However, after a few decades the expected return on investment falls below the interest rate and people refuse to invest, even as overcapacity in capital goods gives rise to massive layoffs, reducing the demand for consumer goods. Unemployment and a long economic crisis ensue as economies contract. People and companies save their resources until confidence begins to return and there is an upswing into a new capital formation period, usually characterized by large scale investment in new technologies.