The US became an economic power house. England did not fare so well. What of Canada, Australia and New Zealand?
The UK lost the mantle after World War I, and the economic power house status migrated to the banking centers of New York, at least compared with London. They struggled with their currency afterwards. When the second war to end all wars came along, it finished them off as an empire, essentially. Britain “lost” both world wars if you want to look at it that way. A lot of historians believe the world was profoundly altered in World War I, and it’s all been downhill since, and may never recover.
While Australia had a strong pre-war agricultural sector it only had a very modest industrial base. Post-war access to cheap mechanisation probably boosted broad-acre grain production here as elsewhere, and it grew and maintained that sector until the present. Industries based on WW2 production like the Holden car company developed but were seldom significant exporters and were limited by the size of the domestic market.
The limitations of a small market encouraged the Australian federal and state governments to initiate a massive hydro-electric scheme - our Snowy Mountains Scheme - which was to be nation-building by simultaneously providing cheaper power, expand irrigation and river management, bring in a massive cohort of European but non-British immigrants and give the economy a kick up the arse. It was a qualified success in all four counts.
That boosted the domestic market but Australia’s prosperity rested mainly on giant scale agriculture, which became more efficient over time, and the rise in mining, especially in iron ore and coal. The prosperity that resulted was certainly great news if you were in it, but it depended on the chance of geography and geology, so much so that the attitude was derided as the ‘Lucky Country’ of relying on nature’s bounty and assuming that other people could do the heavy lifting.
My Father was in the 5th USAAF stationed in Australia. He considered taking up the offer to move there, but he met my Mother.
To get a handle on this question, we can compare GNP growth in the 2 decades following WWII. It might be better to use per person growth, but this is what I found.
| GROSS NATIONAL PRODUCT GROWTH RATES OF SELECTED COUNTRIES, 1950-2010 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Nation | 1950-60 | 1960-70 | average |
| United States | 3.3 | 3.8 | 3.6 |
| Soviet Union | 5.7 | 5.1 | 5.4 |
| Japan | 5.9 | 10.8 | 8.4 |
| China | 7.4 | 6 | 6.7 |
| West Germany | 8.9 | 4.5 | 6.7 |
| United Kingdom | 3.4 | 2.9 | 3.2 |
| France | 5.1 | 5.6 | 5.4 |
| India | 2.9 | 3.8 | 3.4 |
| South Korea | 4.1 | 9.5 | 6.8 |
| Taiwan | 8.2 | 8.6 | 8.4 |
| Brazil | 6.7 | 6.1 | 6.4 |
| Argentina | 3 | 4.3 | 3.7 |
| Turkey | 6.3 | 5.8 | 6.1 |
| Mexico | 6 | 6.9 | 6.5 |
| Egypt | 6.8 | 4.7 | 5.8 |
Neither Australia nor New Zealand made the list, but I thought it might interest people anyway. Europe and Japan benefited from playing catch up to the US’s technological level: their growth performance generally beat the US (and this was during a golden age of US growth).
Some countries with lower per capita income than the US were not able close the gap substantially. Those countries included the UK, India, and Argentina. Japan’s performance was amazing, but so was Taiwan’s.
I do wonder sometimes how things would have been different in the UK if WW2 had never happened.
The Empire mostly wanted out, so the captive market was going to go whatever. The country was locked into a class-ridden, male-dominated state of apathy. Would industry have developed if the war had not created the impetus?
Germany too, benefitted hugely from the help the Allies put in after the war. They also were a country with a firmly entrenched aristocracy.
As I recall from Social Studies, Canada benefited from Ontario and Quebec being close to the industrial heart of America around the Great Lakes. This assisted in the intial war effort and inductry continued to grow after. Some branch plants were established. The Auto Pact (post war?) initially set the stage for Detroit auto companies to sell into Canada without facing our tariff protection in return for a decent share of the production capacity.
So Ontario and to some extent Quebe became industrialized being conveniently located, much of the rest of Canada (TROC) dependent on agriculture and resources. However, like many other countries, Canada had protectionist tariffs (outside of the auto industry) that then benefitted those Ontario industries. Otherwise, in many places it would have been cheaper to bring goods in from the USA.
(I still remember the fun times with early personal computers. Buy it from the USA - pay import duties, IIRC around 11%. The hard disk died, send it back to the US for warranty repair. The repair was free, the computer came back no tax since it had already been taxed, but the replacement hard drive - despite being free under warranty - required duty to be paid on the list price)
WWII helped kick our industry into high gear and tariffs sustained it. Quebec. for example, had a large textile industry so clothing imports were heavily taxed until a few decades ago. Now it’s all made in Vietnam and Bangladesh.
There are some serious caveats that go with this. West Germany benefited from the Marshall Plan; the USSR wasn’t so forthcoming with economic aid for quite some time afterwards, most of the economic transfer was in the other direction in the form of war reparations going from East Germany to the USSR. Then there was the issue of the millions of Germans who died in the war, and the reasoning that the US felt it had to get West Germany back on its feet economically so as to not be vulnerable to a communist encroachment, that being the enormous damage done to its economy both from ground combat in the closing months of the war and the years of strategic bombing of its cities. Add to that the loss of East Prussia, Alsace-Lorraine, and the eastern part of the country to the shifting of Poland westward on the map as the USSR kept its slice of Poland and Poland got part of eastern Germany as compensation. Add to the large numbers of Displaced Persons that resulted from Germans being uprooted as both a result of these territorial changes and the expulsion of Germanic peoples from parts of Europe, both those who had lived there for generations as well as the German colonists who had been moved to their lebensraum in ethnically cleansed Poland during the war.
The German aristocracy had ceased to have anything firmly entrenched apart from the ability to have von attached to their family name after WW1 with the establishment of the Wiemer Republic in 1919.
South Korea as well, the mediocre GNP growth from 1950-60 was largely the result of the devastation of the country due to the war there from 1950-53.
I recall for Morita’s biography (he co-founded Sony) that for 10 years after the war, the Japanese population was close to starvation. Similarly, on a visit to Vienna I noted it was more than 10 years after the war before the famous opera house was completely rebuilt.
Basically, there was a lot to do everywhere to recover from the war - except North America.
It wasn’t until the late '60s/early '70s that the last of the bomb sites here were built upon.