ABSTRACT
By the early 1950s the first stage in the postwar recovery of the international economy had largely been completed. The European economies had been reconstructed, and normal peacetime production had been resumed in most of them. Inflation had given way to price stability and currency overvaluation had been corrected by the widespread devaluations in 1949. These signs of widespread economic improvement meant that, in contrast to the depressed conditions of the 1930s and the grim austerity of the war and early postwar years, the 1950s and 1960s were decades of rapidly rising living standards for the greater part of the population in Western Europe, North America, and Oceania. From 1950 to 1973, real GDP of the top 16 OECD1 countries rose at an average annual rate of 4.8 per cent while labour productivity (GDP per man-hour) grew at a high rate of around 4.5 per cent a year on average. This transformation in living standards was epitomized in the new and everwidening range of consumer durables which quickly became an accepted part of the consumption patterns of the people in these countries. Where income levels did not allow immediate purchase of these goods, greater security of employment increased the attractiveness of living on credit, which permitted a more rapid accumulation of these material goods than would otherwise have occurred. In this age of affluence, advertising took on a new importance and television provided the advertisers with a new medium with which to practise their highly specialized selling techniques. But the increased importance of advertising not only reflected the existence of growing affluence but it was also a necessary adjunct to modern industrial technology.
