ABSTRACT
During the period from 1950 until the early 1970s the world economy, and particularly the individual economies of the industrialized nations within it, enjoyed a sustained period of growth. The real GDP of the top sixteen OECD countries rose at an average annual rate of 4.8 per cent while the rate of growth of productivity rose by a similar amount, of around 4.5 per cent on average.1 However, in the period since 1970 there have been a number of downturns in the world economy, in 1974-5, in 1980-2, and again at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. At least two of these downturns coincided with sudden dramatic increases in oil prices, and caused speculation as to the level of correlation between the two phenomena. The economic problems were resented the more because the period from 1950 until around 1973 was one of economic growth and affluence, at least for the main industrialized nations of the West. Their populations enjoyed increas ing affluence, improved standards o f living and a vastly changed lifestyle to incorporate the products of a mass production economy. Western Europe enjoyed many of the developments which had characterized the United States in the 1920s, notably the move to a mass-production/mass-consumption economy based upon the premise that the individual worker was also increasingly the consumer of the goods which he or she produced. Thus, relatively high wages enabled the mass production of popular consumer products, particularly those developed as a consequence of the rapid advances in technology and premised upon the use of cheap energy. Lifestyles altered out of all rec ognition, with improved education, increased opportunities for those lower down the social scale, and a greater emphasis upon the service sector of the economy. The contrast between the standard of living in most Western countries in the 1950s and 1960s with that prevailing in the interwar period was considerable.
