This paper surveys the extensive literature on European economic growth since 1950. It presents an overview of comparative growth performance together with benchmarked growth accounting estimates. The growth experience is considered in terms of three periods, the Golden Age of 1950-73, the...

Italy's economic performance between 1945 and 1992 is assessed in a general theoretical framework for productivity growth measurement which enables us to relax the binding assumptions of standard Solow-type neoclassical models. The paper shows that `true productivity' was of minor importance,...

The Paper draws its motivation from the observation that, three years into the single currency, EMU financial markets are making only slow progress towards integration and from the belief that economic history can offer useful insight as to the causes of the phenomenon. In this vein, we...

This paper investigates secular changes in the distribution of personal expen-diture in Italy over the period 1881-1961. To do so, the authors constructed a new dataset, the Italian Household Budgets Database (IHBD), consisting of 4,370 family-level budgets. Methodologically, this paper improves...

The paper comprises a thorough survey of the literature on growth in Western Europe since 1950. This experience is put in the context both of long-run historical trends and the ideas emanating from recent work in growth economics. The exceptional nature of the Golden Age (c.1950-73) is confirmed...