Slowdowns and Meltdowns: Postwar Growth Evidence from 74 Countries

This paper proposes an explicit test for determining the significance and the timing of" slowdowns in economic growth during the postwar period. We examine a large sample of" countries (both industrialized and developing), and find that a majority though not all " exhibit a significant structural break in their postwar growth rates. In nearly all of these cases the break was followed by a growth slowdown. The breaks fall into two primary periods" which delineate countries by developmental and regional characteristics as well as by the" magnitude of the subsequent slowdowns. We find that (a) most industrialized countries" experienced postwar growth slowdowns in the early 1970s, though (b) the United States Canada and the United Kingdom did not, and (c) developing countries (and in particular American countries) tended to experience much more severe slowdowns which with the more developed countries, began nearly a decade later.