ABSTRACT
Writing in 1961, N. Kaldor picked out a set of six 'stylised facts', enabling the long-term economic evolution of the associated theoretical equilibrium growth-paths to be compared. 3 If recent economic circumstances were not enough to cast doubt on these observed regularities, it seems possible to add to them a number of features characterising, over a period of about twenty years, an increase in the scale of imbalances, occurring by degrees. These features reveal the irreversibility of certain developments which oppose the cyclical movements observed before the Second World War. They are:
(1) The (disputed) fall in the productivity of, and rate of return on, capital.
