ABSTRACT
While the differences with its Muslim-majority neighbors are many, Israel’s economy has suffered from much the same pattern of up-anddown growth. In its case, however, the ups have gone farther and the downs have been less significant. Years of rapid growth pre-1973 gave way to a war economy suffering from increasingly poor management until the country reached the brink of hyperinflation in the mid-1980s. In 1985 a sharp change in direction stabilized the situation, setting the stage for the rapid growth in the 1990s, fed by Russian immigration and an effective move into high technology. In the new millennium, as the high-tech boom collapsed and conflict with the Palestinians escalated, the economy stumbled, though it ultimately recovered with renewed reforms and de facto separation from the Palestinians.
