Business and Politics in West Germany

Abstract

In the last twenty years the economies which have been hailed as economic miracles are newly-industrialised nations such as South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Brazil and (though with a longer history of industrialisation) Japan. It is easy to forget, therefore, that the term ‘economic miracle’ was first applied to West Germany. From the ruins of 1945, West Germany has surged forward economically, not only surpassing the British economy but equalling (in terms of real living standards) the USA. In the thirty years after the Second World War, West Germany became established as the industrial powerhouse of Western Europe, the industrial locomotive to which other European countries would look for the economic power to drag them out of recession. The growth of the German economy was a phenomenal achievement by a people so reduced in circumstances in 1945 that the average daily calorie intake (at 1451) was less than half the figure for 1936 (3113).¹