A General Description of Growth Trends

Abstract

Time series that display periodicity can be described with a Fourier expansion. In a similar vein, a recently developed formalism enables description of growth patterns with the optimal number of parameters (Elitzur et al, 2020). The method has been applied to the growth of national GDP, population and the COVID-19 pandemic; in all cases the deviations of long-term growth patterns from pure exponential required no more than two additional parameters, mostly only one. Here I utilize the new framework to develop a unified formulation for all functions that describe growth deceleration, wherein the growth rate decreases with time. The result offers the prospects for a new general tool for trend removal in time-series analysis.