Structural slumps

by Edmund S. Phelps

Dissatisfied with the explanations of the business cycle provided by the Keynesian, monetarist, New Keynesian, and real business cycle schools, Edmund Phelps has developed from various existing strands - some modern and some classical - a radically different theory to account for the long periods of unemployment that have dogged the economies of the United States and Western Europe since the early 1970s. Phelps sees secular shifts and long swings of the unemployment rate as structural in nature. That is, they are typically the result of movements in the natural rate of unemployment (to which the equilibrium path is always tending) rather than of long-persisting deviations around a natural rate itself impervious to changing structure. What has been lacking is a "structuralist" theory of how the natural rate is disturbed by real demand and supply shocks, foreign and domestic, and the adjustments they set in motion . To study the determination of the natural rate path, Phelps constructs t