ABSTRACT
The term “Great Depression” had been applied to economic downturns in the 1870s and 1890s. But the Great Depression of the 1930s was much much worse: It was longer, deeper, and more geographically extensive than any other economic contraction in the modern world, and likely in all of world history. In many countries, including the United States, per capita incomes were still lower in 1939 than they had been in 1929. Economists generally think that the Great Depression began in those countries that had become the richest in the world over the previous century: Europe and former European settler societies, and especially the United States. As these economies contracted, they reduced their imports from the rest of the world. In the United States, output and employment fell by perhaps a third from 1929 to 1933. There was then a recovery to 1937, but then another sharp recession and recovery from 1938.
