Economic Cycles: Their Law and Cause

Abstract

IN this volume Prof. Moore has undertaken to test statistically the theory that the fundamental cause of that curious swing in trade, which results, in alternate periods of depression and expansion instead of steady growth or decline, is a corresponding cycle in the weather, operating through its effect on the crops. Rainfall data for the Ohio valley are subjected to harmonic analysis, and the periodogram shows principal periods of thirty-three and eight years. These periods and their semiharmonics applied to the statistics of yield and production for some of the principal crops suggest that they will also account for the principal fluctuations in quantity, as might be expected from the high correlation between the yield and the rainfall of the months that are critical for each crop. Changes in yield are also highly correlated with changes in price for the several crops, and hence the general relation of the crop-cycle to the cycle of prices and trade in general-though matters are not so simple as might be thought at first sight, for in some manufacturing industries, e.g., the production of pig-iron, price and production rise and fall together.

Economic Cycles: Their Law and Cause.

By Prof. H. L. Moore. Pp. viii + 149. (New York: The Macmillan Co.; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1914.) Price 8s. 6d. net.