WARTIME PROSPERITY - A REASSESSMENT OF THE UNITED-STATES-ECONOMY IN THE 1940S

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Seattle University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S0022050700010251
• 发表日期: 1992
• 页码: 41-60
• 关键词: unemployment

摘要

Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that war prosperity prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.