Created 10/17/1995
Go to Brad DeLong's Home
Page
Comment on Peter Temin
Peter Temin, "The `Koreaboom' in West Germany: Fact
or Fiction?" (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. xerox, 1995)
J. Bradford DeLong
(delong@econ.berkeley.edu)
University of California at Berkeley and NBER
October 1995
Adobe .pdf version
Introduction
Commenting on this paper is oddly difficult. Peter Temin considers the strain
of German post-World War II economic history that "sees the West German
miracle... in some trouble, perhaps even foundering, in 1950" and being
rescued by "a deus ex machina, an exogenous positive demand
shock coming from the unexpected outbreak of hostilities in Korea."
As Temin sets the issue, the real stakes are whether those Present at the
Creation of the post-World War II North Atlantic international order were
skillful--did a good job of building institutions to create and guard freedom
and prosperity--or simply lucky. Those who see the "Koreaboom"
as a key event are making a point on the "luck" side.
Peter Temin's paper documents that this talk of a "Koreaboom"
is nonsense. West Germany did not see a stimulus at the outbreak of the
Korean War but its opposite: the price of West Germany's imports rose, and
a brief balance-of-payments crisis developed, solved by the actions of the
newly-born European Payments Union. Had the EPU not acted, perhaps Germany's
ongoing boom would have been damped as a result of the Korean War.
He is convincing. What then can I say?
I am not qualified to discuss the twists and turns of German historiography
that created the "Koreaboom" mythos. So let me, instead,
try to indicate what in the logic of the situation might make a German historian
prone to find a positive impact where none existed.
Supreme Allied Commander Europe
The first is that the Korean War had important long-run consequences for
U.S. relations with Europe. By the middle of the 1950s, there was a full
U.S. army--corps, divisions, airwings, and the standard enormous logistical
tail--sitting in West Germany waiting for Stalin's successors to attempt
in Germany what Stalin, Mao, and Kim Il Sung had attempted in Korea: the
reunification by force of a country that had been divided in the armistice
that ended World War II. Stalin's successors were largely unknown: the only
solid thing about them was that they had flourished under Stalin and shot
a couple of their own number in the power struggle that followed Stalin's
death.
Stalin had exhibited a taste for snatching up territory when he thought
it could be taken cheaply--starting with the suppression of the Mensheviks
in Georgia, including the annexation of Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, and
Estonia. That Western Germany could probably not be snatched up cheaply
was not wholly reassuring, because Stalin had also exhibited a certain degree
of bad judgment: in addition to allowing Kim Il Sung to launch the Korean
War, there was the unsuccessful attack on Finland in 1939 and the mother
of all miscalculations, the belief that the way to deal with Hitler was
to become his ally and then watch Nazi Germany and the western democracies
exhaust themselves in trench warfare. Perhaps Stalin's successors would
exhibit a similar appetite for conquest on the cheap, and a similar weak
grasp of geopolitical realities.
So by the mid-1950s a full U.S. army was sitting in Western Germany as a
deterrent. And the U.S. was spending on a relatively large scale to project
its Cold War military power beyond its borders. Roughly three-quarters of
a percent of U.S. national product in the mid 1950s was "net military
transactions"--expenditures abroad by the U.S. army which generated
no dollar inflow.
German Exceptionalism
As the figure above shows, the increase in net U.S. military transactions
partially offset the winding-down of the Marshall Plan. Thus the forces
of the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, provided one secure source of demand
for German production during Germany's boom in the 1950s.
And boom in the 1950s the German economy certainly did. German recovery
in the 1940s can be understood as recovering the productive capacity that
had existed before the war, with the added benefit of an extra decade and
a half's worth of technology. But as the figure above shows, the German
economy in the 1950s crashed through the output-per-capita levels that would
have been projected by someone connecting pre-World War II peaks, and has
come to rest since 1973 at about its pre-1913 growth rate, but at a level
of output-per-capita some forty percent higher than anyone would have dared
to project on the basis of the pre-World War II experience.
German Log Stock Prices and Dividends
The magnitude of the boom came as a surprise to the Germans. The real value
of a basket of German equities multiplied eightfold during the 1950s--without
any reinvestment of dividends--for an average real return of twenty-five
percent per year. The German economy showed itself able to absorb a very
large population displaced from the east in a relatively small number of
years.
This reduction of unemployment from double-digit levels to zero-digit levels
took place with no sign of inflation or excess demand pressure at all: the
average inflation rate from 1949 to 1970 was 1.7 percent per year. And this
reduction of unemployment did not trigger anything like the degree of labor
strife that had characterized pre-World War II (and pre-World War I) Germany.
It is as if at the end of World War II the entire German economy
was secretly replaced. American soldiers in the 1950s could never find anyone
who had admired Hitler, and there are fewer continuities and similarities
between the pre-Nazi and the post-World War II German economies than there
should be.
The brutal fact is that we have models capable of explaining a ten percent
rise in national product over two generations as a result of a shift in
the savings rate, a three percent increase in productivity as a result of
a reduction in trade barriers and specialization in industries of comparative
advantage, and--maybe--a one-fifth reduction in output variance at business-cycle
frequencies as a result of successful monetary policy.
We have no models to explain a transformation as large as that between the
pre-Nazi and post-World War II German economies--and neither does anyone
else.
So we grasp at straws. We are all grasping at straws. So should we be surprised
when we catch German historians doing it too?
Created 10/17/1995
Go to Brad DeLong's Home
Page
Professor of Economics
Brad DeLong, 601 Evans
University of California at Berkeley; Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
(510) 643-4027 phone (510) 642-6615 fax
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/
Comments