IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/stechp/978-981-10-1605-9_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

World War II and US Economic Performance

In: Economic History of Warfare and State Formation

Author

Listed:
  • Price V. Fishback

    (University of Arizona)

  • Taylor Jaworski

    (Queen’s University)

Abstract

One popular view is that World War II ended the Great Depression and led to a postwar boom in the United States. On the other hand, recent studies suggest that the reallocation of resources to meet war demands may have imposed more costs than benefits. In the first part of this chapter we review recent evidence on the war’s impact on the United States economy at both the national and local levels. In the second part we extend recent work on the impact of World War II on local economies. We use a simple spatial equilibrium model and data for all United States counties to estimate the long-run impact of the war-related spending on income per capita, population, and median housing values per decade from 1960 to 2010. The empirical results show that the main changes in local economies were due to the reallocation of population toward counties that received more per capita war spending. The War was associated with very little growth in income per capita and median house values. When combined with the model, these results suggest that mobilization for World War II was mostly correlated with an increase in the value of local amenities, which were likely related to the proximity to defense-related industries and associated non-wage benefits.

Suggested Citation

  • Price V. Fishback & Taylor Jaworski, 2016. "World War II and US Economic Performance," Studies in Economic History, in: Jari Eloranta & Eric Golson & Andrei Markevich & Nikolaus Wolf (ed.), Economic History of Warfare and State Formation, pages 221-241, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:stechp:978-981-10-1605-9_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-981-10-1605-9_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jung, Yeonha, 2020. "The long reach of cotton in the US South: Tenant farming, mechanization, and low-skill manufacturing," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 143(C).
    2. Jung, Yeonha, 2018. "The Legacy of King Cotton: Agricultural Patterns and the Quality of Structural Change," SocArXiv trjfz, Center for Open Science.
    3. Li, Zhimin & Koustas, Dmitri, 2019. "The long-run effects of government spending on structural change: Evidence from Second World War defense contracts," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 178(C), pages 66-69.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:stechp:978-981-10-1605-9_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.