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The Golden Age of European growth: A review essay

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2006

Peter Temin
Peter Temin
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge MA 02139, USA
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Abstract

This paper surveys recent scholarship on the economic growth of Europe during its Golden Age, 1950–73, as represented by three recent collections of essays. The essays generally agree that rapid economic growth in the Golden Age originated in reconstruction from World War II. They explore several different arguments to explain why the Golden Age continued after reconstruction was complete and use a variety of economic tools to argue that the Golden Age was a transitory historical phenomenon. There is far more agreement on the origins of the Golden Age than on its demise. I suggest that insights from new growth theory are limited and that the end of the Golden Age may have been brought about by the ‘shock’ of restrictive monetary policies used to combat inflation after the oil crises of the 1970s.

Type
Review Essay
Information
European Review of Economic History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 127 - 149
Copyright
Cambridge University Press 1997

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