Growth and Change in the World Economy Since 1950

Abstract

The world economy has grown and changed since 1950. It is six times larger and more integrated than then, though growth has been uneven through time. Rates of profit, GDP growth and capital formation were greater before the early 1970s than since. While poverty, famine and the dominance of the industrial market economies are constants, other features of the global economy have changed — financial markets have become global (Corbridge et al. 1994) and increasingly dominate productive capital, while multinational corporations have entangled more and more countries ever more tightly into a network of intra-corporate links (Dicken 1992). Despite the events of the last few years, the emergence of Japan and the newly industrialized economies as economic powers represents another important structural change.