The 'German Question' dominated much of modern European history. In 1945, Germany was defeated and conquered. Yet, the Second World War did not destroy the foundations of her economic power. Dr Tamás ...Vonyó revisits Germany's remarkable post-war revival, tracing its roots not to liberal economic reforms and the Marshall Plan, but to the legacies of the war that endowed Germany with an enhanced industrial base and an enlarged labour force. He also shows that Germany's liberal market economy was in reality an economy of regulated markets, controlled prices and extensive state intervention. Using quantitative analysis and drawing on a rich historiography that has remained, in large part, unknown outside of Germany, this book reassesses the role of economic policy and the importance of wartime legacies to explain the German growth miracle after 1945 and the sharply contrasting experiences of East and West Germany.
This paper reveals the impact of wartime destruction in urban housing on regional economic growth in West Germany between 1939 and 1950. I demonstrate econometrically that the German economy remained ...severely dislocated as long as the urban housing stock had not been rebuilt. The recovery of urban industry was constrained by a war-induced labour shortage and, therefore, industrial capacities remained underutilized. In contrast, the growth of the rural economy was facilitated by labour expansion, which depressed industrial labour productivity. I apply instrumental variables to account for endogeneity and robust regressions to adjust for the impact of outliers.
This article reconsiders the relative growth performance of centrally planned economies in the broader context of postwar growth in Europe. It reports a new dataset of revised estimates for ...investment rates in eastern European countries between 1950 and 1989. Complemented with data on other growth determinants, this evidence is used to re–evaluate the socialist growth record in a conditional convergence framework with a panel of 24 European countries. After controlling for relative backwardness, investment rates, and improvements in human capital, the findings show that centrally planned economies underperformed due to their relative inefficiency only after the postwar golden age. In the 1950s and 1960s, eastern Europe was falling behind mainly due to relatively low levels of investment and weak reconstruction dynamics. Both are explained, in part, by the lack of labour–supply flexibility that, in turn, resulted from the comparatively much larger negative impact of the war on population growth in eastern Europe.
This article presents new estimates for investment and new growth accounts for three socialist economies between 1950 and 1989. Government statistics reported distorted measures for both the rate and ...the trajectory of productivity growth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Researchers have benefited from revised output data, but have continued to use official statistics on capital input, or estimated capital stock from official investment data. Investment levels and rates of capital accumulation were much lower than officially claimed and over‐reporting worsened over time. A setback in factor accumulation—both investment in equipment and labour input—contributed very significantly to the socialist growth failure of the 1980s.
ACCOUNTING FOR GROWTH IN HISTORY Prados de la Escosura, Leandro; Vonyó, Tamás; Voskoboynikov, Ilya B.
Journal of economic surveys,
July 2021, 2021-07-00, 20210701, Letnik:
35, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The contributions to this Special Issue present the state of the art of growth accounting in economic history, exhibiting its strengths and weaknesses. Three set of articles compose the issue: ...comparative papers that discuss the challenges ahead, long‐run perspectives on Britain since the Industrial Revolution, Japan, Italy and Spain from the late‐19th century, and Latin America during the 200 years since independence, and post‐World War II episodes under Soviet and Fabian socialism and the transition to market economies in Eastern Europe and India. The papers reveal how sensitive the interpretation of results is to the quality of output and inputs and the growth accounting procedure employed and the need to adopt the new developments in growth accounting to improve economic history narrative.
The relative decline of the East German economy after 1945 has eluded researchers, as several large shocks appeared to have hit it at the same time. In this paper, we revisit the immediate post-war ...period in both parts of Germany to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the output and productivity shocks operating in both economies. Our principal finding is that the dismantling of the capital stock alone cannot explain the inferior performance of the East German economy. The collapse of output after the war and the ensuing recovery in both parts of the country were driven by total factor productivity; changes in factor endowments were of second-order significance. West Germany began to lead East Germany in industrial labor productivity well before the economic reforms of 1948 could make their mark. The major factor contributing to this early divergence were disproportions in industrial structure caused by the division of Germany.
This article briefly reviews the core literature on the Golden Age of economic growth and tests the explanatory power of alternative theories against one another, with particular emphasis on the ...reconstruction thesis as developed by Jánossy. While previous empirical work on the subject relied on cross-sectional analysis, I employ panel-data techniques, which produce more robust estimates. I demonstrate that, for the core western industrialised nations, the rapidity and variety of economic growth during the 1950s and 1960s can mostly be explained by post-war reconstruction, the completion of which marked the end of the Golden Age. Labour-force expansion also made a very strong positive contribution. In the more peripheral countries of the OECD, however, rapid catching-up from the late 1950s was largely brought about by structural modernisation. Finally, human-capital accumulation has had a determining impact on long-run growth potentials, modelled here as time-constant country-fixed effects.
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