Ciclos y determinantes del crecimiento económico: Perú 1950 - 1996 

This essay is concerned with Peruvian economic growth and its cycles from 1950 to 1995, and the long stagnation that begins in 1975-1978. The corresponding analysis is based on the hypothesis that the Peruvian economic dynamics responds to the unbalanced character of industrialization and to the behavior of investment that was not affected by the import substitution process. With an investment vector that does not stimulate the domestic market, the growth and the cycles are determined by demand impulses that come from the public sector and/or from those external markets where domestic industrial production is competitive. Since the demand increases are correlated with a greater external deficit, the sustained growth, in the long term, is impossible unless the structural problems of the manufacturing sector are solved. Once the importance of this sector and its significant correlation with other demand determined activities are tested, the data of non-primary output is calculated in order to explain its long run behavior and to test, by co-integration method, the role of the state expenditures in the generation of its cycles and trend. Finally, by estimating the non-primary potential output, the hypothesis of the long run stagnation, associated to the exhaustion of import substitution process, is confirmed.