The idea for this book emerged sometime in 1984 when Noel Butlin and I began to think about the ability of the Australian economy to recover fully from the deep recession of 1982–83. This recession, coming after a slow period of economic growth from 1974–75, raised the question in our minds as to whether a serious depression was in store for the near future. Between 1972 and 1983 unemployment in Australia had increased from under 2 per cent to 10 per cent, the highest level since the 1930s. A similar outcome had occurred throughout most of Europe.

These concerns naturally led to a discussion of the 1930s and to the belief that we should try to place the Australian experience of that time in an international context to see what more could be thus learnt. We also believed that it would be useful to bring together economists and economic historians to a conference to discuss the recovery process from the depression. The Reserve Bank of Australia and the visitors programme of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University financed the conference; the resulting papers make up this volume.

We chose Barry Eichengreen to write an international perspective chapter which focused on the role of devaluations in the recovery process because devaluations were an important part of the policy mix at the time.

Then we decided to look at four overseas countries: the United Kingdom (Tim Hatton), Canada (Alan Green and Gordon Sparks), New Zealand (Gary Hawke) and Japan (Yasukichi Yasuba). It was agreed not to include the United States for detailed investigation because the depression experience there has been so well documented.