The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of inventories in the economy and in the business cy¬cle. Having compared the sensitivity of inventory investment and fixed investment to changes in in¬terest rates, the author rejects Blinder’s thesis that “business cycles are, to a surprisingly large degree, inventory cycles”. In other words, as a secondary category of investment, investing in inventories can¬not be the cause of a business cycle. The author concludes that inventories are an investment in the availability of goods, providing entrepreneurs with the necessary operational flexibility. The more flex¬ible the economy, the milder the business cycle will be. Thus, the paper argues that inventories are a stabilising factor in the business cycle. The author also proves that the predominant view in the mac¬roeconomic literature, according to which an inventory investment represents a destabilising factor in the production process, results from in-correct reasoning based on a no-time GDP equation and indi¬cates the lack of proper understanding of the dynamic market process.
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