GDP per capita in the U.S. and Western Europe 1950-1998

In 1950, GDP per capita in Western Europe (29 countries) was just 48 percent of GDP per capita in the U.S. The post-war economic boom from 1950 to 1973 was the most prosperous period in Western Europe's history, and GDP per capita more than doubled in this period, reaching 69 percent of the U.S.' rate. Due to several economic crises in Europe in the following decades, growth rates in Western Europe remained relatively stable. Still, they did not reach the same heights as seen during the so-called Golden Age of Capitalism.

In contrast, the U.S. had been harder hit than Western Europe by the economic difficulties of the 1970s and 1980s, but the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 coincided with one of the most successful decades in U.S. history, with the economy thriving in the 1990s. For Western Europe, the fall of communism had a knock-on effect that limited growth in the early 1990s, although GDP per capita compared to the U.S. was fairly similar to 1973's rate (albeit lower) at 66 percent.