Economical Versus Political Cycles In An Iberian Manufacturing Sector

The paper discusses several questions related to the economic cycles, from the scientific methodological approach to isolate the economic cycles, to an empirical application using data of the Portuguese industrial sector, passing by the identification of the real economic cycles that modulated the productive activity during almost the last 5 decades of the 20th century, and by its rationality. It ends trying to identify the explicative factors of the different phases of expansion, alert, depression, recession and recovering of the estimated economic cycles and puts them side-by-side with the political cycles dictated by the democratic elections.