The paper aims to look into the origin and nature of global economic crises, the least studied
phenomena of the global economic life – the phenomena, the nature of which still has not received a
generally accepted explanation in economic science. Market economy has its own laws, the spontaneous
nature of which is revealed in times of crises. However, the analysis of global “crisis experience” draws
attention to an important feature in the implementation of various forms of crises that remains at all the
stages of economic development. Some economic shocks, despite their urgency and scale, gradually give
way to recovery and then – to complete recovery. Other end up with weak revival and depression, gradually
turning into a new recession. Such crises, depressions, and periods of sluggish economic recovery form
the “waves of crisis development” that hold the economy in a depressed condition for a long time. The
impact and the consequences of these “waves” of economic shocks that are sequential or overlapping
in time go beyond the medium-term economic dynamics. They occur within a long-term (Kondratiev)
cycle and coincide with its descending phase, when, according to empirically confirmed ideas of the great
Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev, the economy is undergoing a difficult stage of the crisis-depression
development that shapes the parameters of future economic growth. The present paper unites the economic
events of this stage in the concept of “systemic economic crisis”. This concept is introduced for the purpose
of structuring in the single economic process the diverse phenomena occurring at the downward phase of
the long-term cycle. Each of them may be due to special causes and have a separate history, but initially,
all these events are subordinated to the decision of general systemic problems, and for this reason can be
considered as part of the single systemic crisis, the overcoming of which provides the rise of the society to
qualitatively new frontiers of economic development. The present paper is an attempt to understand the
causes and consequences of systemic economic crises as a fundamental phenomenon of the long-term
economic cycle
Keywords
economic development, long-term economic cycle, recession, depression, systemic economic crisis, systemic problem, innovative upgrading, economic modernization