Growth tigers of the 1950s

If we pull out Japan, Israel, and postwar European catch-up, and do per capita growth, B.R. Shenoy’s list of top performers looks like this:

Jamaica, 6.9%

Trinidad and Tobago, 5.9%

Algeria, 5.7%

Puerto Rico, 5.5%

Rhodesia and Nysaaland, 4.1%

Turkey, 2.9%

Philippines, 2.5%

If you do absolute rather than per capita, many of those numbers go up by a few percentage points, for instance the Philippines becomes 5.8% and Algeria becomes 8.0%.

Those numbers are from B.R. Shenoy’s book Indian Economic Policy.  Are there lessons?  One is that parts of the Caribbean are in fact wealthier than many people think.  Another is that the 1950s were a very good decade for the Caribbean, culturally too.  A third lesson is that the top performers in one period may not have legs.  Finally, looking at this table makes one realize, yet again, how good it was to more or less rid the world of communism.