Читать книгу Sustainable Futures - Raphael Kaplinsky - Страница 17

The dawn of the new decade in 1950 followed twenty years of global turmoil, particularly in Europe and North America. The 1930s had been dominated by the Great Depression, with falling living standards and millions of people thrown out of work. The decade saw the rise of Nazism in Germany, and fascism in many other European countries. If the Depression was not bad enough, 20 million soldiers and 40 million civilians were killed during World War 2. Much of the productive capacity of European economies was destroyed, and Europe’s infrastructure was in tatters.

It was on these shaky foundations that the world transitioned to two decades of unparalleled rapid economic expansion after World War 2, and not just in the high-income industrialized economies. Economic historians characterize this era as the ‘Golden Age’. This economic expansion was based on a reconstruction boom, with very large investments going into repairing the damages of war, massive house-building programmes and creating the infrastructure for a new age of mass consumption, automobilization and suburbanization. This sustained economic progress was made possible by the productivity gains generated by the deployment of the Mass Production techno-economic paradigm.

However, the benefits of these stimulants to growth began to tail off. After the early 1970s, the global economic growth rate and the rate of growth in the two major economic regions (the USA and Europe) declined steadily. Figure 2.1 provides a pictorial snapshot of these post-war growth trends for the world, for the US and for those economies currently members of the European Union. The data reflect the simple average of individual economies’ growth rates, and take no account of the relative size of their economies. Eyeballing this graphical representation, three trends are clear. First, there was considerable variation between years. Second, the average growth rates of the world, the US and Europe broadly followed similar trends. Third, after 1973 the trend rates of growth declined. Given population growth this means that in recent years – on average and not taking account of the distribution of growth – there was barely any increase in per capita incomes. (In fact, as I will show in the following chapter, most of the gains from growth were reaped by the already rich. In the US, for example, real wages for the low- and middle-skilled workforce stagnated after 1979.)

Figure 2.1 The expansion of Gross Domestic Product, 1961–2018: World, US and Europe (% per annum)

Source: data from World Bank World Development Indicators

Table 2.1 decomposes these broad trends into four periods. The first reflects the high-growth phase between 1961 and 1973, the Golden Age. (In fact, the boom began during the 1950s, but a consistent database is unavailable to illustrate this.) The second period – 1974 to 1985 – was dominated by the recovery from the two oil-price shocks of 1973 and 1979. The third phase (1986–2006) was one of deepening globalization, coinciding with China’s policy of ‘Opening Out’ in 1985. This led to the unbundling of production in the high-income economies and the growth of global supply chains in China and other low-wage economies. The final period was the decade after the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Table 2.1 Average annual economic growth rates: World, US and Europe (%)

	1961–1973	1974–1985	1986–2006	2007–2017
World	5.5	3.2	3.0	2.6
United States	4.6	3.1	3.0	1.4
European Union	5.0	2.3	2.4	1.0
China	5.2	8.9	9.4	8.8
India	3.5	4.9	5.6	6.9
Source: data from World Bank World Development Indicators

These data evidence a steady decline in economic growth rates in the US and European economies which dominated the global economy. During the Golden Age first phase, their average annual growth rates exceeded 4.5 per cent. Thereafter, they declined steadily to an annual average of around 3 per cent until 2006. After the Financial Crisis in 2008, the rate of economic growth in both the US and Europe did not even match the rate of population growth. By contrast, some developing countries, including very large economies such as China and India, experienced sustained and high rates of growth over this long time period, exceeding 8 per cent in China and 5 per cent in India for more than two decades.