Presents the empirical data of business cycles and the theories that economists have developed to explain and prevent them, and considers case studies of recessions and depressions in the United States and internationally.

The main task of this work is to develope a model able to encompass, at the same time, Keynesian, demand-driven, and Marxian, profit-driven determinants of fluctuations. Our starting point is the Goodwin's model (1967), rephrased in discrete time and extended by means of a coupled dynamics...

Goodwin's model is a set of ordinary differential equations and is a well-known model of the growth cycle. However, its four constants require an extensive numerical study of its two differential equations to identify all possible unsteady state behaviors, i.e. phase portraits, which corresponds...