ABSTRACT
It would be difficult to find a more striking contrast among industrial countries than that between the relative position of Britain and Germany in 1945 and forty years later in, say, 1985. At the end of the war Germany was in chaos. Industrial production was down to about a quarter of the prewar level, large imports of food were necessary to provide inadequate rations, and exports were almost negligible. There was an acute shortage of coal, steel and electric power and extensive damage to the whole system of transport and communications. It was not until the end of 1950 that industrial production recovered to the prewar level and not until the following year that the current account was in balance.
