Introduction

Over the postwar period as a whole, the Belgian economy has grown more or less in line with the economies of its neighbours. Long an industrialized country, Belgium was relatively well-off after the Second World War and remains so today. But Belgian postwar growth followed a distinctive path, the main feature of which was a sharp improvement in its relative performance around 1960. Belgium started the postwar period with an economic structure that resembled that of the UK, another early industriahzer, and, like the UK, it lagged behind other countries in improving productivity during the 1950s. Since 1960 Belgian growth has accelerated, and productivity growth, especially in manufacturing industry, has been unusually rapid and sustained. One major task of this chapter is to explain why growth was relatively weak before the 1960s and why it improved so strikingly thereafter. Another is to consider the nature and sustainability of Belgium's relatively strong growth performance in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly when seen against its very high unemployment rate and the parlous state of its public finances.

This survey builds on a diverse, yet relatively underdeveloped, secondary literature. There have only been a few attempts to survey the Belgian experience of economic growth since the war (De Brabander, 1981; Van Rijckeghem, 1982; Vandewalle, 1982; Vandeputte, 1985, 1993; Van der Wee, 1985, 1987; Mommen, 1994). The rest of the existing literature tends to break at around 1960, although not because relative performance improved then.