文档介绍：文献翻译
原文
Understanding West German economic growth in the 1950s
Barry Eichengreen -Albrecht Ritschl
Abstract We evaluate explanations for why Germany grew so quickly in the 1950s. The recent literature has emphasized convergence, structural change and institutional shake-up while minimizing the importance of the postwar shock. We show that this shock and its consequences were more important than neoclassical convergence and structural change in explaining the rapid growth of the West German economy in the 1950s. We find little support for the hypothesis of institutional shakeup. This suggests a different interpretation of post-World War II German economic growth than features in much of the literature.
Keywords: Economic growth Productivity Germany
1 Introduction
There is no shortage of attempts to explain West Germany’s economic growth in the 1950s. With good reason: between 1950 and 1959, GDP rose by nearly 8% per annum, faster than anywhere else in Europe and in stark contrast to experience following World War I. Among European countries, only Austria, which shared many circumstances with Germany, came close to matching this performance. Germany’s rapid growth doubled living standards in a decade. By the early 1960s it had restored Germany’s status as the largest and potentially most influential economic and financial power in Europe.
Sources: output per capita: calculated from Maddison (1991, 2003), Feinstein (1972)
Capital/labor ratio: Hoffmann (1965)
Agricultural
employment and
e shares:
Germany: calculated from Statistisches Jahrbuch fuer das Deutsche Reich,
various issues; Deutsche Bundesbank (1976)
Britain: calculated from Maddison (1991), Feinstein (1972)
Explanations for this experience are of three types (see Eichengreen 1996 for an earlier review). A first school of thought seesWest Germany’s fast postwar growth in the context of productivity catching up and convergence. TheWest German economy grew rapidly after World War II, in this view