Germany overtook Britain in comparative productivity levels for the whole economy primarily as a result of trends in services rather than trends in industry. Britain's productivity lead in services before World War II reflected external economies of scale in a highly urbanised economy with an international orientation. Low productivity in Germany reflected the underdevelopment of services in an economy that was slow to move out of agriculture. As German agricultural employment contracted sharply from the 1950s, catching-up occurred in services. This was aided by a sharp increase in human and physical capital accumulation, underpinned by the institutional framework of the postwar settlement.

This article examines the relative importance of sticky wages and sticky prices in explaining the length and the depth of the Great Depression. Econometric evidence shows that the supply failure was an outcome of widespread price stickiness and that wage stickiness only played a minor role as a propagating factor during the first years of the Depression. Microeconomic evidence suggests that there was widespread and increasing industrial concentration during the interwar period.

This article examines the evolution of energy use and pollution emissions in Sweden over the past two centuries – a much longer period than has been investigated in the large literature on the environmental Kuznets curve. In this article we show that both energy consumption and pollution emissions in Sweden declined relative to GDP over the last two hundred years. In absolute terms both energy use and pollution increased up until 1970, after which date energy consumption stabilised and pollutant emissions declined, leading to less environmental stress. The energy intensity results are decomposed to determine the relative impact of structural changes in the output structure versus within-sector changes. For the period after 1970 another decomposition for pollution emissions is performed to separate out changes in preferences from energy-related changes. The analyses show that technical change in a broad sense has been crucial for explaining the long-term decline in both energy intensity and pollutant intensity, while the transition to the service economy had negligible effects. Changed preferences affected the decline in emissions after 1970.

The secular process of convergence in income and product per capita among industrial countries has attracted much well-deserved attention. In Western Europe especially, the cradle of modern industry, this attention has focused on the ways in which ‘follower countries’ have caught up with (or fallen behind) the long-time ‘regional’ technological leader, Great Britain. In this context, a long tradition considers France as offering the standard alternative to modern British economic institutions and development (Kindleberger 1964). With regard to economic performance, however, it is only recently that claims have been backed by systematic quantitative evidence. Despite sometimes conflicting interpretations, a consensus view has gradually emerged (Crouzet 2003) which concludes that the Anglo-French gap in income and productive capacity slowly closed from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, reconciling ex post calculations with some of the conclusions of enlightened contemporaries and later historians (Bairoch 1982, Crafts 1984). After World War II and the introduction of standardised national accounts, the course of productivity and real income per head in both countries is much better documented and suggests the completion of the secular catching-up process by the 1960s (Van Ark 1990). However, between the ‘controlled conjectures’ of the pre-World War I era and the quasi-certainties of post-1945, the interwar years still remain a grey zone. During the 1920s, Britain's industry, marred by industrial unrest, mass unemployment and loss of competitiveness, is supposed to have fared especially poorly compared with its competitors, Germany and the US. In a book published in 1931, a French scholar, André Siegfried, claimed that Britain was descending along the path of industrial decline (Siegfried 1931). By this time, France had completed its postwar reconstruction, the value of the franc had been stabilised, and the French economy was in full swing: in 1930 French public opinion basked complacently in the belief that the country would be spared the devastating effects of the depression sparked by the Wall Street crash.