ABSTRACT
After twenty-five years of practically uninterrupted spectacular economic growth, Western European economies started experiencing in the 1970s a major and long-lasting economic contraction whose causality is not limited to the sharp increases in the prices of imported oil dictated by the OPEC since the end of 1973. A complex conjunction of developments, some of which adversely affected Western European economic systems as early as the 1960s, are responsible for the economic downturn of the ‘western’ economies in the 1970s. Briefly, the following were some of the developments having a restraining effect on Western European economic growth.
