Mechanisms of economic growth and development: a long wave theory perspective

The article reveals the concepts of economic growth and economic development through the prism of structural instability models and long wave theory. The author shows the limitations of neoclassical and neo-Keynesian, as well as later approaches tothe interpreting the mechanisms of economic growth and cycle. The author shows that many of contemporary main economic schools, considering the relationship between economic growth and scientific and technological progress, treat the role of scienficand technological progress as an engine of economic growth as fundamentally exogenous. At the same time, the models of structural instability which have been developed since the 1970s by the scholars who worked within the theory of long waves in the economy have identified subtle endogenous mechanisms of integration of scientific and technological progress into the process of economic development. Economic development, if one applies the approach of structural instability models, is understood through the economic cycle with its integrated endogenous mechanisms. The article considers the mechanism of the economic cycle as a key element of economic development. Economic growth appears in the dialectical unity of its nature: as a period in the mechanism of cyclical economic development (in growth rates) and as a general trend of economic development (in absolute terms).