Against the background of government recovery policies, the German economy continued to modernise itself under the impact of ‘technological momentum’. That is, firms continued to innovate; to adopt new production methods; to devise new products; to break down the older ways of business and replace them with modern ones. The most noticeable shifts over the recovery period occurred in the continuing process of amalgamation and the elimination of the smaller marginal producers. This was nothing peculiar to the Nazi period. Levy had charted its progress through the 1920s in his book on Industrial Germany published in 1935 [62]. During the 1930s some 300,000 small businesses disappeared, while cartelisation became compulsory in those areas not already cartelised. High growth occurred in the new areas of the economy, in the motor industry, in chemicals, in the aircraft industry, in electrification. The more traditional goods, including foodstuffs and textiles, recovered only slowly and continued to decline as a proportion of German industrial output as they did in the other major industrial economies (see Table XIV). The pattern of investment reflected this. The heavy industrial sector expanded almost 200 per cent over the period 1932 to 1938; the consumer industries by only 38 per cent. Industrial investment was provided by the state and by funds produced within the firms themselves on the basis of expanding profits and a fall in costs, particularly of building, labour and raw materials.