Does the Concept of Secular Growth Have a Place in Capital - Based Macroeconomics ?

Macroeconomic analysis has been relatively neglected by Austrian economists since the beginning of the Austrian revival in the early 1960s with the publication of Murray N. Rothbard’s Man, Economy, and State (1993)1 and America’s Great Depression (2000). Rothbard’s treatise contained new and improved elaborations of the Austrian theories of money, capital, and business cycles. In particular Rothbard integrated the structure-of-production analysis developed by Wicksell and Hayek with the Fetter-Mises pure time-preference theory of interest, thus at last reuniting after many years two divergent strands of Böhm-Bawerk’s capital and interest theory.2 In America’s Great Depression, Rothbard provided a notable application of Austrian business cycle theory that still stands as the exemplar of applied research in Austrian economics. Unfortunately, after Rothbard’s pathbreaking contributions, systematic thinking in Austrian macroeconomics was not very vigorously pursued.