Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s
@article{Higgs1992WartimePA, title={Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s}, author={Robert J. Higgs}, journal={The Journal of Economic History}, year={1992}, volume={52}, pages={41 - 60} }
Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal…
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