Abstract:
Hicks theorized about the trade cycle, from many perspectives,
over the whole span of his long, fertile and distinguished profes-
sional life. Beginning with thoughts on an equilibrium approach
to the problem of the trade cycle in the early 30s, traversing1 those
disequilibrium workhorses of macrodynamics, IS-LM and Multiplier-
Accelerator models, he returned, in hunted hare fashion, to a Robert-
sonian starting point. In this paper I attempt to construct a math-
ematical tapestry of some of these Hicksian visions and vignettes,
concentrating on (non-linear) trade cycle theories. I suggest that
there are still pearls of analytical wisdom, on the non-linear dynam-
ics of trade cycle theory, to be extracted from A Contribution to the
Theory of the Trade Cycle (CTTC). The unlikely link between the
way an economic conundrum, inherent in CTTC, was resolved and
the resolution of (Part B of) Hilbert s 16th Problem for Liénard s
equation is brie y mentioned.
