Introduction

The contributions in part I of this volume considered different approaches to the theory of production dynamics within a simplified set-up, which relies upon the description of production systems in terms of input–output flows between processes. In these contributions we have seen that advances which have been made in analysing economic dynamics in the context of disaggregated representations of the productive structure of an economy relied heavily on various methods of decomposition. In the succeeding chapters of part II we examined instead the dynamics of production by looking at the complex internal structure of individual processes, and at the pattern of interdependence among such processes. The aim of this chapter is to explore the implications of the more detailed representation of production processes presented in chapters 6–8 for the analysis of the dynamics of the economic system as a whole. Again, we will see that the decomposition of the productive system as implied by the explicit analysis of ‘networks’ or subsystems' in chapter 6 will provide the basis for the analysis of economic dynamics at the level of the economic system as a whole. In particular, the identification of various types of ‘networks’ facilitates the identification of the factors (‘impulses’) which initiate patterns of structural change and they also contribute to the explicit analysis of structural change in the wake of such initial impulses.

The following section 2 examines the way in which the time structure of production activities (along the three previously identified dimensions) may influence the time phasing of structural change, and thus its characteristics as a process with particular features through historical time.