Structural Development & Resource Cycles

← Back to Domain-Specific Families

Abstractions about long-run development, productivity, public spending, industrial cycles, resource dependence, exchange-rate effects, and middle-income stagnation.

7 abstractions in this family — domain-specific abstractions that sit near one another in structural-signature space (k-means over structural-signature embeddings). Each is shown with its short description.

• Balassa-Samuelson Effect — The mechanism by which countries with fast-growing tradable-sector productivity end up with systematically higher price levels and appreciating real exchange rates — because tradable wage gains spill through mobile labor into non-tradable prices that cross-border arbitrage cannot compete away.
• Dutch Disease — Trace how a boom in one tradable sector hollows out the others by running a foreign-exchange windfall through two channels — a spending effect that appreciates the real exchange rate and a resource-movement effect that bids up factor costs — so that headline GDP rises while non-booming tradables de-industrialize.
• Kondratiev wave — The contested hypothesis that capitalist economies exhibit roughly 40-60-year cycles of expansion and contraction, driven by clusters of general-purpose innovations whose diffusion generates a long upswing, saturates, and gives way to a depressive phase in which the next techno-economic paradigm gestates — a heuristic placement ladder more than a predictive model.
• Kuznets swing — Read a roughly 15-25-year cycle in construction and investment as the interaction of two coupled lags — a slow demographic demand pulse against the multi-year build lag of long-lived capital — placing it as the medium octave between the short business cycle and the long Kondratiev wave.
• Middle-Income Trap — The growth deceleration where a country that rose from low to middle income via factor accumulation stalls before high income, because the engines of the first regime exhaust while the qualitatively different capabilities of an innovation-led regime are not yet built.
• Paradox of Plenty (Resource Curse) — The resource-curse regularity that extractive-rent dependence can turn abundance into slower development through five reinforcing channels — Dutch disease, revenue volatility, severed tax accountability, conflict finance, and diversification crowd-out — whose mix and timing are gated by prior institutional quality.
• Wagner's Law — The empirical regularity that as a country industrializes and per-capita income rises, public expenditure grows faster than GDP so its share of national income climbs — driven by the compounding pull of administrative load, income-elastic demand for merit goods, and Baumol cost-disease.