Cyclical fluctuations and the structure of production

During the second half of 2006, Giampaolo Garzarelli was researching the yet unsorted Ludwig Moritz Lachmann Archives at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, to see if there was something of interest to consider for an institutional economics project on Lachmann. To the best of his recollections, the archival material at the time was contained in six or seven drawers of two old and rusty metal file cabinets of four drawers each. One of the most intriguing finds, in addition to Lachmann’s eyeglasses, was an Italian offprint from Annali di Statistica e di Economia. The offprint is of a brief 1936 article co-authored with A. M. Neuman entitled ‘Le fluttuazioni cicliche e la struttura della produzione’. The title of the present article is the English translation of the title of this Italian article. This Neuman–Lachmann article does not appear in the Appendix compiled by Tulloh that lists the bibliography of works by Lachmann collected in a well-known posthumous volume. We thus seem to be in the presence of a work that is at least unknown to English readers. This article serves three purposes. First, to offer some background on the authors, their situation and their work at that time; second, to put the article into context by relating it to Lachmann’s broader work on capital; and, third, to offer a translation of this article from Italian to English.