Research On Characteristics And Causes Of Economic Crisis In Different Historical Periods

From the period of agricultural civilization, the economic crisis had already appeared and evolved together with the development of human society. At the different periods, the dominant factor, influence and show of economic crisis are different, and reflect internal evolution of social history. So, research on economic crisis along with the development of economics. Recently, the research on economic crisis have been very mature in theory and methods, so that some scholars believe that modern macroeconomic policies have solved the problem the business cycle (Bernanke,2004), any further measures for business cycle bring little benefits (Lucas,2003).However, a terrible world-wide economic crisis broke out in 2008 after these opinion, people have to consider how to understand the economic crisis again. Theoretical abstraction is a characteristic of economics, but the abstraction always covers many important historical facts. In the book "How economics forgot history:the problem of historical specificity in social science ". Hodgson discuss the relationship between general theories and characteristics of history. He thought that the emphasis on the general theory made the theory ignore the historical character. Theory can not explain different historical characteristics. He pointed out that the general analysis method must be completed by a special analysis method that is sensitive to the specific historical background, institutional background and cultural background. This is the reason we research on economic crisis from the perspective of history.This paper researches on economic crisis from the period of agricultural civilization. We divide four stages of the history and separately research economic crisis in different stage.The main part of this article contains four chapters, namely Chapter III to VI. Chapter III research economic crisis of agricultural civilization. We first give the basic characteristics of this period. On the basis of this, we make comparison of the characteristics during agricultural civilization between Western Europe and Chinese. Through out the comparison, we differentiate balance of population and resources by amount and structure meaning so as to explain the character of economic cycle during china agricultural civilization. Finally, take "Daoguang Depression" as an example to intensify the cognition of economic crisis in agricultural society.Chapter IV research economic crisis in early capitalism, covering the 18th century to early 20th century. First, we gave simple introduction about the birth of capitalism and the understanding of capitalism. Then we define the meaning of early capitalism and give out the basic features of this period. Next, we analyze appearance and characteristics of economic crisis at this period. Finally, we analyze the reason of economic crisis according to the characteristics of the historical stage.Chapter V research economic crisis during the monopolists and the imperialist period, we focuses on period of the early 20th century to the 1970s and the two oil crises. First we make a brief introduction about character of economic development in this stage. Then, we focus on analysis on the background, process and impact of the Great Depression, meantime analyze capitalist development tendency. Finally, we summarize the characteristics of the economic crisis at this period.Chapter VI discuss the economic crisis under the global economic imbalances, the time covered the 1980s to 2008. We focus on economic crisis caused by the conflict between virtual economic and entity economic under the background of economic globalization and economic imbalance.Chapter VII provide summary and the problem should pay more attention to in the further research..The research methods are:(1) the combination of induction and deduction. (2) Case studies. Select samples of historical cases, such as "Daoguang Depression" and the Great Depression of the 1930s to deepen the understanding of characteristics of specific historical stage. (3) Historical materialism. From human social and economic development, summarizes the characteristics of each period of economic operation. (4) Overall study of the history.The innovation of this paper is that it attempt to research the economic crisis from the angle of historical development during the time covered the 1980s to 2008. Regarding the research in economic crisis of agricultural civilization, this paper makes division of population and resources in amount meaning and structure meaning, to coordinate New Malthusianism faction and Neo Marxism faction, and use this division to explain of agricultural civilization of China's dynasty changes which is consistent with the economic cycle. During research in the capitalist economic crisis, we research from the capitalist world-system perspective, emphasizing since capitalism birth, after the world system established, the world economy become uneven development and impact the economic crisis. Although Braudel and Wallerstein have emphasized that we should study capitalism at overall angle and many scholars emphasizes the importance of research on history of capitalism in overall history angle, but this kind of research mainly applied to research in capitalism seldom applied to research on economic crisis.The shortcomings of this paper are:(1) We has not put forward a comprehensive framework to integrate all factors (2) For the period of agricultural civilization of the economic crisis, it should be further divided into specific periods. (3) For the the importance of population we given special emphasis when analyzing the economic crisis of agricultural civilization, but not throughout the whole study. (4) We do not have empirical analysis.