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The article comments on a paper published within the issue, "Capital Formation and the Recent Productivity Slowdown," by Peter Clark. The author also discusses results from his own research in "Accounting for United States Economic Growth, 1929-1969," and applies it to Clark's paper. It is suggested that an abrupt rise in energy prices may have affected growth rates during the mid-1970s. The author also looks at a similar analysis made by John Kendrick, who focuses on the U.S. postwar period of 1948-1966.

In a recent issue of this journal, Beil et al. (2005, hereafter, BFJ) examined the relationship between telecommunications investment and economic growth in the United States over the period 1947-1996. Based on results from Granger-Sims test, BFJ conclude that '... investment by telecommunications firms is caused by, but does not cause, economic activity, and the findings are robust across lag lengths'. However, using another version of the Granger causality test due to Toda & Yamamoto (1995) and the same data set transformed into natural logarithms, the evidence in this paper indicates a feedback where there was a bi-directional causality between telecommunications investment and economic growth. This seems to suggest that policies aimed at stimulating the US economy by accelerating investment in the telecommunications sector may be successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents summary of articles present at a round table conference on population problems. Joseph J. Springler's paper is concerned principally with the effects of the various population movements now in process in the United States upon the level of employment. Population movements now in process probably exercise a greater influence today than formerly upon the amount of absolute and disguised unemployment in the American economy because of the greater specificity of factors of production today as compared with formerly. Otto Nathan, in his paper, stated that in analyzing the relationship between population movements and the economic development a distinction should be made between the secular trend and the business cycle proper. One of the factors constituting the secular or long-term development is the population movement itself. In his paper, Alan R. Sweezy, expressed that once an investment boom in underway, increase in the labor supply does have an important influence on investment. Wages rise more slowly than they would with a constant labor supply and numerous investment opportunities consequently can be exploited which would otherwise be unprofitable. The boom once started may be expected to last longer if the labor supply is increasing.

This paper examines some economic forecasts made in late 1930 that were intended to predict economic activity in the United States in order to shed light on several methodological issues. We document that these forecasts were extremely optimistic, predicting that the recession in the US would soon end, and that 1931 would show a recovery. These forecasts displayed egregious errors, because 1931 witnessed the largest negative growth rate for the US economy in any year in the twentieth century. A specific question is what led forecasters to make such serious and substantial empirical errors. A second more general issue involves the methodology of forecasting. The 1930 forecasts were sometimes based on explicit analogies with previous serious business cycles. Modern forecasting approaches are based on techniques that may not be recognized as analogies. Using the 1930 forecasts, we examine the implicit‐analogy content of forecasts, and what might render such implicit analogies valid or invalid. This 1930 forecast example also resonates beyond the confines of economic methodology because forecasts about the Great Depression are of continuing interest to the profession at large, and we produce a forecast series not previously available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a paper on economic-demographic interactions and long swings in economic growth. The paper building on the work of numerous predecessors, suggests that one of the mechanisms responsible for long swings in economic growth may involve interactions among aggregate demand, labor-market conditions, and household growth, with a feedback effect from the last to the first. An upswing in the growth of aggregate demand and the growing labor-market tightness induced thereby engenders accelerated marriage, migration, and household growth. These are critical decision points in the life cycle, entailing spending commitments extending over several years as a new home is established and a family started or settled. In effect, such commitments are geared to a notion of permanent income and thus tend to be relatively insensitive to short term income changes. A bunching of such commitments serves to cushion the economy against the usual business cycle and becomes exhausted only gradually. Such a bunching of long term spending commitments may be the key to Kuznets cycle phenomena.

The article reports on the forecast of the CIT Group that the textile industry is expected to grow in the year 1998 to 1999. In the CIT Group's annual forecast, it is stated that after two consecutive years of decline, real U.S. textile shipments should reach nearly 80 U.S. billion dollars in 1997. It is said that the new outlook says real growth will moderate during 1998 and 1999 at rates of 2.1 percent and 0.9 percent respectively. It is further reported that specialty fibers such as spandex have recently been attractive.

The analysis of synchronization among regional or national business cycles has recently been attracting a growing interest within the economic literature. Far less attention has instead been devoted to a closely related issue: given a certain level of synchronization, some economies might be systematically ahead of others along the swings of the business cycle. We analyze this issue within a system of economies and show that leading (or lagging behind) is a feature that does not occur at random across the economies. In addition, we investigate the economic drivers that could explain this behavior. To do so, we employ data for 48 conterminous US states between 1990 and 2009. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the degree of synchronization between the Mexican states and the US business cycles by using a growth cycle approach for the period 1997-2007. The business cycle indicators are obtained from seasonally-adjusted monthly manufacturing production. Our results confirm that the Mexican aggregate cycle is highly synchronized with the US business cycle. However, although specific Mexican state cycles are pro-cyclical with respect to the US business cycle, their synchronization is very heterogeneous. In particular, it is strong and robust only for the states of Baja California, Jalisco, Nuevo León and the Federal District, and at least moderate for the state of Mexico and Querétaro. The results are robust with respect to three different detrending methods. Synchronization may be explained by the high volumes of international trade carried out by foreign firms in the case of the central and traditionally industrialized states, and by the "maquila" production in the Northern bordering states. This synchronization may be explained by the vertical integration of the productive processes resulting from the internationalization of production of multinational firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major problem of base theory is the lack of an acceptable and objective technique to identify the export and service employment in the local economy. In this article, researchers propose and test a new approach to handle this problem. The findings as presented in this paper further confirm researchers belief that the Location Quotient approach is not an appropriate technique to measure and forecast the economic base of a region. This conclusion is in complete agreement with other studies that have also evaluated this technique." However, researchers go beyond these criticisms and findings by presenting a new approach for conducting economic base analysis. The new model provides the regional analyst a more objective tool for conducting economic base analysis and it can show him how national growth may constrain local growth despite his efforts to boost local employment. Another unique characteristic of this new model is that it can be easily linked to national quarterly models of the U.S. economy such as the Wharton or Brookings model.

This paper is an attempt to contribute to the integration of business-cycle analysis with long-term growth. a real-business-cycle model with endogenous growth is developed and estimated with U.S. data. In the present framework, wage movements do not have to be transitory to generate fluctuations in labor effort. The reduced form is a constrained bivariate output/hours (or real-wage/hours) VAR process. The bivariate setup provides a useful framework for analyzing the persistence of output fluctuations, given that the theory implies that hours of work contain information about future output movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses ways in which difficult changes in Eastern Europe have allowed Japan to become an economic power. Eastern Europe's financial crises have arisen due to troubles transitioning to free markets and capitalism. American policy makers who have acknowledged the financial problems of countries such as the Soviet Union or Germany have also realized they can implant Japanese money in the place of European money. In the same time that communism is on the verge of extinction as a viable species of government, Japan has undergone changes nearly as significant to international relations as those of the Soviet bloc. Advantages to Japan's economic involvement in Western markets are discussed.

The United States (US) industrial product index (IPI) and West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices during 1986 to 2008 are analyzed to reexamine the relationship between oil prices and the US economy. A key feature of this study is an analysis of changing distribution of the US IPI growth rates over time by the quantile regression model and a meaningful comparison analysis with the results of the ordinary least squares estimates is examined. The following conclusions are drawn from our empirical results. First, while oil prices have a significant negative impact on the US economy over expansive conditions, the relationship between them is positive when the US economy is experiencing recession regimes. Second, the asymmetric relationship between oil prices and the US IPI growth rates identified by this study could satisfactorily explain the existing puzzle regarding the link between oil prices and the US economy among prior empirical studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses that franchising methods that emerged in the late years as significant strategy for business growth, job creation, and economic development both in the U.S. and the world markets. The franchisers are sorted as product-trademarked or as business format franchisers. The business format of franchising is anticipated to be dominant form of franchising internationally in the twenty-first century . However, the business format of franchising has been experiencing rapid growth in the U.S., the period of rapid international expansion of some U.S. franchisers increased their overseas units.