WESTERN EUROPE: Present Prosperity

Out of Geneva's Palais des Nations last week came one of those statistics-studded reports that make the back pages of newspapers but really tell an electrifying story. The news is that Western Europe—not just one country, but all of it—is booming. The U.N.'s Economic Commission for Europe concluded last week that the upturn in European production, "which began in some countries in 1953, is becoming general." Unemployment is dwindling fast in most countries, and Western Europe's gross national product is growing at the rate of 10% a year, a faster rate of growth than that of the U.S.

For 250 million Europeans, the industrial comeback means the return of the first real prosperity they have known for a generation. Much of the prosperity is precarious; old problems remain. Yet the fact is that in 1954 proud old nations, brought to their knees by war, are reasserting themselves, adventuring on new horizons of commerce and technology. Western Europe now produces more than a quarter of the world's steel, a quarter of its coal, and one-third of its foreign trade.

Britain, biggest of Europe's industrial nations, set the pace in 1954. Austerity and rations are now safely behind, and Englishmen are taking seriously the once fanciful talk of a new Elizabethan Age.

The island's industrial boom, less spectacular than West Germany's, is in absolute dimensions far bigger. In the first six months of 1954 Britain's industrial production increased by 6½%. Between 1946 and 1953 British oil refineries have boosted production from 2,400,000 to more than 23 million tons; British steel production, up 5.4% this year, has reached 19 million tons a year—enough for Britain's annual production of 1,000,000 cars and trucks, about a quarter of the world's new ships, and well over half the total of Western Europe's output of armaments. In the first nine months of 1954, half a million British vehicles sold abroad for $725 million—almost one-third more than U.S. automobile manufacturers earned in foreign markets. The vast sterling area, which accounts for 40% of all the world's trade, is selling more than it buys, has a growing reserve of nearly $3 billion.

London, last of the war-devastated metropolises to mend its scars, is about to cover its blitzweeds with bright new stores and office buildings. Plans have been drawn for a Rockefeller Center-like project topped by a 27-story building. Two weeks ago Sir Winston Churchill abolished the controls which have held back reconstruction in the City of London. Business had to wait while materials and labor went first to building homes for homeless Britons—a program which achieved 350,000 new homes in one year.