Over the last decade there has been an increasingly widespread feeling that conventional static economic theory is unable to offer a convincing analysis of the evolution of economic systems and reliable proposals for remedies to the situation of stagflation. As a consequence, in the last five or six years there has been renewed interest in the analysis of long waves described by Kondratieff (1926, 1928), which were consigned to oblivion after World War II. As early as 1913 Pareto wrote a paper, taking France as an example, which sketched very clearly the argument that the world economy was characterized by long-term oscillations. The idea was that a study of long-term tendencies, or the forces and mechanisms that shape and govern them, would help in answering in a more satisfactory way the questions posed by the real world.