A long-term cycle in business activity, perhaps sixty years in length, results from clusters of innovation whose effects gradually erode away. It is this underlying cycle on which such short-run phenomena as Kitchin cycles are superimposed.

The theory that economies of the Western capitalist world were prone to major up-and-down super cycles lasting fifty to sixty years. Also known as the Kondratieff wave, this theory was developed by Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff in the 1920s and has some adherents today although it is controversial amongst economists.