Customer Reviews

The Economics of World War II: Six Great Powers in International Comparison (Studies in Macroeconomic History)

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This book is a very learned overview of the macro-economic factors affecting the WWII war economies of major combatants. A certain degree of acquaintance with economic monetary theory is advisable. The fact that it includes all the major players is valuable (any article on Italy's war efforts is always welcome!), but the emphasis some of the articles give to econometric treatment is, frankly, irrelevant to understanding most of the war effort, especially when one is talking of survival. The book also tries to analyse how wartime experience helped shape the post war economy, a field in which it it quite successful. It is worth noting, by the way, that generally speaking all the authors seem to agree that wartime investment in capital formation and technical training schemes paid off for the vanquished, whilst in the case of the USSR, the amount of war destruction and the political predominance of the "industrial-military complex" led, ultimately, to economic stagnation.

Advisable for anyone with a serious interest in wartime economics.

This books sets out to compare development of the wartime economies of the six major antagonists of World War Two; the USA, USSR and United Kingdom for the Allies and Germany, Italy and Japan for the Axis.

The detail provided for each country is vastly different. The quality of raw data available to each chapter's author was obviously variable but the editor could have done much more to align the data and presentation.

The book is too technical for a non-economist reader, with little explanation of the tables of economic data it contains. The standard of English in some chapters is also quite poor.

Despite the book's best efforts, there remains a gap in the market for a readily digestible presentation of the economic aspects of World War II.