Hicksian Visions and Vignettes on (Non-Linear) Trade Cycle Theories

Hicks theorized about the trade cycle, from many perspectives, over the whole span of his long, fertile and distinguished professional life. Beginning with thoughts on an equilibrium approach to the problem of the trade cycle in the early 30s, traversing those disequilibrium workhorses of macrodynamics, IS-LM and Multiplier-Accelerator models, he returned, in hunted hare fashion, to a Robertsonian starting point. In this paper I attempt to construct a mathematical tapestry of some of these Hicksian visions and vignettes, concentrating on (non-linear) trade cycle theories. I suggest that there are still pearls of analytical wisdom, on the non-linear dynamics of trade cycle theory, to be extracted from A Contribution to the Theory of the Trade Cycle (CTTC). The unlikely link between the way an economic conundrum, inherent in CTTC, was resolved and the resolution of (Part B of) Hilbert's 16th Problem for Liénard's equation is briefly mentioned.