The Economic History Podcast
The Economic History podcast is a platform for sharing knowledge, ideas and new research with a general interest audience. Each fortnight, we meet leading academics in the field and discuss a range of topics, including pandemics, long run economic growth, gender issues, financial crises, inequality, sustainable development and a number of weird and fun economic experiments in history. There is no time like the past to help us understand the present.
The Economic History Podcast
The Long Economic Shadow of World War II in Europe
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Episode 29
In this episode, we chat with Prof. Tamás Vonyó about the long run variation in the impact of World War II across a range of European economies. We begin with discussing the comparative wartime destruction across regions (using Tamás' "5 D's") and then move on to contrast the growth experiences of Western Europe and Eastern Europe with these initial starting points in mind. We also revisit the 1980s collapse of the Eastern Bloc and reconsider the role of factor inputs as a cause of socialism's failure, as an alternative to the traditional narrative, which places the blame on productivity/innovation deficiencies.