AHC: Both Britain and France have higher per capita GDP than Germany by 2015

raharris1973

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Here are the parameters of the challenge:

PoD can be no earlier than 1872

The Soviet Union cannot have a geopolitical footprint any further west than OTL
 
Have Germany's borders restored to their 1937 boundaries after World War II, making a larger East Germany. The country reunifies and has a larger % of people living in areas with lower GDP.
 
France and the UK get their economic act together after WW2 and go for a strategy of emphasising their geographical advantage. Industrial modernisation is pursued at all costs a la Japan. Huge investments in R&D are made. The UK consequently avoids OTL decline and France its later malaise.
GDP per capita should be 10% to 20% higher than in Germany by 2015.
 
France and the UK get their economic act together after WW2 and go for a strategy of emphasising their geographical advantage. Industrial modernisation is pursued at all costs a la Japan. Huge investments in R&D are made. The UK consequently avoids OTL decline and France its later malaise.
GDP per capita should be 10% to 20% higher than in Germany by 2015.

Or not - more economic activity in UK/France also means a higher trade volume with Germany which in turn means more economic activity in Germany leading to a higher GDP per capita in Germany.

You need institutional corruption and ineptitude in Germany on par with Italy to keep the GDP/capita down.
 
French ownership of the Rhineland after WWI would certainly increase the amount of available capital for industrial modernisation.
Add to this no Franco-German friendship and the EU being built off the Entente and not the Franco-German axis and you almost certainly got it.
 
Much depends here on which GDP series you look at; if you use the World Bank figures with 2000 prices, the UK is ahead of Germany. If you use current-year prices, Germany is ahead, but only since 2008. Looking at that data, getting the UK into the lead is easy; all you have to do is match French and German productivity growth, which basically requires fixing British industry. Okay, maybe 'easy' was the wrong word. But the problems are well understood.

France is more interesting - it doesn't seem to be so much France underperforming as Germany overperforming. By and large, France and Germany keep pace quite closely, apart from the period 1990-2004 and post-2008. The 1990-2004 one is odd - given that it's the 15 years or so that Germany was reunifying, I'd expect the GDP per capita to drop off (or at least stagnate) then rebuild. Instead, France stagnates, whilst Germany goes through a boom and mini-recession. The crucial years seem to have been 1990 and 1991; if German productivity growth in those years is closer to the European mean, that knocks up to 6% off their per capita GDP.

Post-2008 is similar; Germany, for whatever reason, bounced back from the financial crash much better than Britain or France. Regress them towards the mean, perhaps with less-effective leadership, and that's a fair bit off the German GDP. Taken together, those should give Germany a GDP slightly lower than France, with a PoD around 1990.
 
Or not - more economic activity in UK/France also means a higher trade volume with Germany which in turn means more economic activity in Germany leading to a higher GDP per capita in Germany.

You need institutional corruption and ineptitude in Germany on par with Italy to keep the GDP/capita down.

It depends, economics don't work that way otherwise France would have a GDP per capita on par with Germany. The French economy has structural issues that were first identified in the late 1950s! Remove these much earlier and the French economy will become a stronger performer earlier. Add in large scale reforms in education and governance and France's potential increases further still!

As for the UK, well industrial decline was avoidable. Keep the North booming and ideally fuelled by money from the City and Britain can have a GDP per capita on par with Japan!
 
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