Our principal aim in organizing this volume has been to present case studies of postwar growth in individual countries written in such a way that the book as a whole gives the reader a genuinely comparative picture. The collection also contains papers on important aspects of the general experience of growth, and an overview chapter which is intended to provide the context into which the country studies fit.

The work which is reported in this book is the outcome of a network which operated during 1992–3 sponsored by the SPES programme of the European Commission, directed by Crafts and Toniolo and administered by CEPR. This organization permitted the establishment of a common format for the country studies and facilitated exchange of ideas and mutual criticism of initial drafts, with the result that the papers are more comparable than would otherwise have been the case.

The reawakening of economists’ interest in growth since the mid-1980s has been one of the principal reasons for this project. At the same time, it is now quite a while since the last exercise of a similar kind, the much used and respected collection edited by A. Boltho (The European Economy: Growth and Crisis, Oxford University Press, 1982). The authors in this volume are able to revisit the topic of postwar growth armed not only with some new theoretical ideas, but also with the experience of the 1980s on which to draw.

Moreover, on this occasion the analysis has been based not only on applied economics, but also on economic history.