Western Europe GDP per capita - not taking into account the new accession counties - was lower in 2001 relative to that of the US than any time since the 1960's.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
After a major loss of dynamism in the 1960s, productivity growth rates began dropping in most countries, falling by half in the U.S. in the 1970s and more or less ceasing altogether in France, Germany and Britain in the late 1990s.
So Europe's a big driver. And at one point, if the euro hadn't devalued, they would have been making as much money as the US with half the stores. Returns were higher.
In its best prewar year, Europe with almost 300 million people had a gross national product of 150 billion dollars. In that same year, the United States with 150 million people had a gross national product of 300 billion dollars.
From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5 percent. That generated a massive gain in real GDP per person from $16,000 to over $50,000. A huge win for the middle class.
A series of studies in the 1990s and 2000s revealed that as women gained more access to education, jobs, and birth control, they had fewer children. As a result, developed countries in western Europe, Japan, and the Americas were seeing zero or negative population growth.
If we didn't have the rest of the world growing, the United States economy would be in much worse shape than it is today.
The UK has a poor investment record. According to IMF data, we have come seventh out of the top seven industrialised countries since 1999.
Europe and North America, we are told, are less dependent on energy-intensive heavy industry than in the 1960s and 1970s. It seems we squeeze more GDP out of a barrel of oil than in those benighted days.
The wealth-income ratio in the United States has always been lower than in Europe. The main reason in the early years was that land values bulked less in the wide open spaces of North America. There was, of course, much more land, but it was very cheap.
Between 1995 and 2009, Western Europe's entrepreneurs created jobs faster than the U.S. did, and European economies exported more than the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Eastern Europe's productivity increased more rapidly than East Asia's.