Crises, depressions, and expansions: Global analysis and secular trends

The goal of this paper is to present a new vision about the evolution of some economics-related agents during the last one and half centuries, which when considered as a whole allow a better comprehension on what is happening and shed some light about possible future trajectories. Four actors, or agents, were minutely examined: world population, its global output (GDP), gold price and the Dow Jones index. The joint action of these actors, despite of being only a part of the whole, might be seen as a good depiction of the great piece representing the world economic realm. The application of analytical tools as spectral analysis, logistic curves and the singularity approach on time series data about the historical unfolding of these actors allows the demonstration that the present crisis seems to be a mix of a self-correction mechanism that brought the global output back to its original learning natural growth pattern, and that it carries also signals of an imminent transition to a new world economic order. Moreover it is demonstrated that the next decade (2011–2020) will be probably one of worldwide economic expansion, corresponding to the second half of the expansion phase of the fifth K-wave. The present results combined with previous empirical work of this author suggest that we are witnessing a transition to a new global socioeconomic system whose evolutionary trajectory is leading the world system toward a true age of transition.