Great Depression

Alternative Titles: Depression of 1929, Slump of 1929


  • “The unemployed, the soup kitchens, the grinding poverty, and the despair”—the worldwide consequences of the Great Depression. From The Second World War: Prelude to Conflict (1963), a documentary by Encyclopædia Britannica Educational Corporation.
    Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Economic history

The timing and severity of the Great Depression varied substantially across countries. The Depression was particularly long and severe in the United States and Europe; it was milder in Japan and much of Latin America. Perhaps not surprisingly, the worst depression ever experienced by the world economy stemmed from a multitude of causes. Declines in consumer demand, financial panics, and misguided government policies caused economic output to fall in the United States, while the gold standard, which linked nearly all the countries of the world in a network of fixed currency exchange rates, played a key role in transmitting the American downturn to other countries. The recovery from the Great Depression was spurred largely by the abandonment of the gold standard and the ensuing monetary expansion. The economic impact of the Great Depression was enormous, including both extreme human suffering and profound changes in economic policy.

Timing and severity

The Great Depression began in the United States as an ordinary recession in the summer of 1929. The downturn became markedly worse, however, in late 1929 and continued until early 1933. Real output and prices fell precipitously. Between the peak and the trough of the downturn, industrial production in the United States declined 47 percent and real gross domestic product (GDP) fell 30 percent. The wholesale price index declined 33 percent (such declines in the price level are referred to as deflation). Although there is some debate about the reliability of the statistics, it is widely agreed that the unemployment rate exceeded 20 percent at its highest point. The severity of the Great Depression in the United States becomes especially clear when it is compared with America’s next worst recession of the 20th century, that of 1981–82, when the country’s real GDP declined just 2 percent and the unemployment rate peaked at less than 10 percent. Moreover, during the 1981–82 recession prices continued to rise, although the rate of price increase slowed substantially (a phenomenon known as disinflation).

    © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Depression affected virtually every country of the world. However, the dates and magnitude of the downturn varied substantially across countries. Great Britain struggled with low growth and recession during most of the second half of the 1920s. Britain did not slip into severe depression, however, until early 1930, and its peak-to-trough decline in industrial production was roughly one-third that of the United States. France also experienced a relatively short downturn in the early 1930s. The French recovery in 1932 and 1933, however, was short-lived. French industrial production and prices both fell substantially between 1933 and 1936. Germany’s economy slipped into a downturn early in 1928 and then stabilized before turning down again in the third quarter of 1929. The decline in German industrial production was roughly equal to that in the United States. A number of countries in Latin America fell into depression in late 1928 and early 1929, slightly before the U.S. decline in output. While some less-developed countries experienced severe depressions, others, such as Argentina and Brazil, experienced comparatively mild downturns. Japan also experienced a mild depression, which began relatively late and ended relatively early.

Dates of the Great Depression in various countries
(in quarters)
country depression began recovery began
United States 1929:3 1933:2
United Kingdom 1930:1 1932:4
Germany 1928:1 1932:3
France 1930:2 1932:3
Italy 1929:3 1933:1
Japan 1930:1 1932:3
Canada 1929:2 1933:2
Belgium 1929:3 1932:4
The Netherlands 1929:4 1933:2
Sweden 1930:2 1932:3
Switzerland 1929:4 1933:1
Denmark 1930:4 1933:2
Poland 1929:1 1933:2
Czechoslovakia 1929:4 1933:2
Argentina 1929:2 1932:1
Brazil 1928:3 1931:4
India 1929:4 1931:4
South Africa 1930:1 1933:1
Peak-to-trough decline in industrial production in various countries
(annual data)
country decline
United States 46.8%
United Kingdom 16.2%
Germany 41.8%
France 31.3%
Italy 33.0%
Japan 8.5%
Canada 42.4%
Belgium 30.6%
The Netherlands 37.4%
Sweden 10.3%
Denmark 16.5%
Poland 46.6%
Czechoslovakia 40.4%
Argentina 17.0%
Brazil 7.0%

The general price deflation evident in the United States was also present in other countries. Virtually every industrialized country endured declines in wholesale prices of 30 percent or more between 1929 and 1933. Because of the greater flexibility of the Japanese price structure, deflation in Japan was unusually rapid in 1930 and 1931. This rapid deflation may have helped to keep the decline in Japanese production relatively mild. The prices of primary commodities traded in world markets declined even more dramatically during this period. For example, the prices of coffee, cotton, silk, and rubber were reduced by roughly half just between September 1929 and December 1930. As a result, the terms of trade declined precipitously for producers of primary commodities.

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King George III, c. 1800.
Kings of England

The U.S. recovery began in the spring of 1933. Output grew rapidly in the mid-1930s: real GDP rose at an average rate of 9 percent per year between 1933 and 1937. Output had fallen so deeply in the early years of the 1930s, however, that it remained substantially below its long-run trend path throughout this period. In 1937–38 the United States suffered another severe downturn, but after mid-1938 the American economy grew even more rapidly than in the mid-1930s. The country’s output finally returned to its long-run trend path in 1942.

  • Evicted sharecroppers along a road in southeastern Missouri, U.S., January 1939.
    Arthur Rothstein—Farm Security Administration/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-fsa-8a10410)

Recovery in the rest of the world varied greatly. The British economy stopped declining soon after Great Britain abandoned the gold standard in September 1931, although genuine recovery did not begin until the end of 1932. The economies of a number of Latin American countries began to strengthen in late 1931 and early 1932. Germany and Japan both began to recover in the fall of 1932. Canada and many smaller European countries started to revive at about the same time as the United States, early in 1933. On the other hand, France, which experienced severe depression later than most countries, did not firmly enter the recovery phase until 1938.

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