ABSTRACT
The period 1945-1970 was one of strong economic growth world-wide. The first years were characterised by recovery and reconstruction, while 1950 marked the beginning of what Maddison has phrased the ‘golden age of unparalleled prosperity’. As the main reasons behind high economic growth, he mentioned a well-functioning international order, domestic policies devoted to the promotion of high levels of demand and employment, and the diffusion of technical knowledge. In two of these three factors, international interaction and the diffusion of technical progress, the US very much took the lead.1 According to the long wave theory, this period is unanimously seen as the upswing of the fourth Kondratieff wave. Writers differ somewhat in their choice of the main technological innovations behind this upswing, but they generally mention the petrochemical industry, synthetic materials, electrical equipment, aircraft and, more generally, mass consumer goods.2 Freeman and Perez typify the fourth Kondratieff wave as ‘Fordist mass production’, a name that interestingly refers as much to organisational as a technical innovation. They see cheap oil as the key factor behind economic growth in this upswing period, just as low-cost steel was the key factor during the third wave. In their view the new techno-economic paradigm could come to its full potential in the post-war period, because of the rematch with its institutional setting. The main features of this institutional setting were large diversified companies, foreign direct investment, a regulative government, social partnership with unions, the spread of company R&D and mass tourism, to name a number of the main characteristics.3
