ABSTRACT
Although in terms of economic growth the 1920s were far from being an unrespectable decade, any broad generalization about the performance and achievements of Europe as a whole during this decade is not particularly illuminating given the widely varying experience between countries within the region. It is true that nearly all countries experienced some economic progress and that most managed to regain or surpass their pre-war income and production levels by the end of the decade, But there was a world of difference between the rapid growth achieved by countries such as the Netherlands, Norway, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland and the near stagnation recorded by Austria, Russia and Poland. Any comparison of relative performance of this kind depends very much on the time-span chosen. Countries like Austria, which only just about regained their 1913 output levels by the end of the 1920s, managed to record rapid growth over the period 1920-9 simply because recovery took place from a very low base. Moreover, for this period it seems sensible to make some distinction between the first and second halves of the 1920s. During the former period, that is up to about 1925, most countries were in the process of recovering from the war; growth rates were often high and yet even so a number of countries, especially in central and eastern Europe, had still not fully regained their prewar output levels by the middle of the decade. On the other hand, the latter half of the period was one of consolidation and further growth, with boom conditions in some cases, though against a basically unstable international economic background with obvious implications for the cyclical downturn that began in 1929. In these later years eastern Europe probably performed somewhat better than the west though the area still remained extremely backward in comparison with the major industrial countries.
