Post-war growth, productivity convergence and reconstruction

In this paper, it is shown that aggregate cross-country analyses of the growth process of the industrial countries should take reconstruction effects into account. The enormous growth rates in many European countries and in Japan in the fifties which often appear as outliers in aggregate analyses of productivity convergence can be understood as a catching-up with respect to the past. Neoclassical capital deepening combined with arguments from growth models relying on the stock of knowledge, knowledge spillovers and technological diffusion as the source of economic growth can explain the fast reconstruction after the war, without referring to country-specific growth factors.