How the World Really Works: A Scientist’s Guide to Our Past, Present and Future

by Vaclav Smil

The years between 1950 and 1973 were marked by rapid economic growth in virtually every part of the world: its global annual mean rate and its average per capita gains were nearly 2.5 times greater than during the previous globalization wave of 1850–1913, and the value of exported goods in the world economic product rose from a low of just over 4 percent in 1945 to 9.6 percent in 1950 and about 14 percent in 1974, equaling the 1913 share but with trade volume nearly ten times higher.65 Economic growth was nearly universal (China’s Great Famine years of 1958–1961 were the most consequential exception) but the benefits of this golden age of economic expansion—the postwar rebound, with high rates of growth helping to decrease economic inequality—were disproportionately concentrated in the West: by 1973, North America and the countries of Western Europe accounted for more than 60 percent of global exports.66 As the major Western European economies (Germany, UK, France) and Japan became the era’s most dynamic traders, inevitably America’s share in world trade gradually eroded.