In the second half of the 20th century, Western Europe consistently had the highest GDP of any region in Europe, doubling any of the other given regions in the selected years. These years are significant, as 1950 marked the end of the post-war recovery period in most European countries, 1973 was the year when the post-war economic boom came to an end, and 1998 was when the former-Soviet states began to recover from the economic impact of communism's end.
The region with the largest GDP per capita growth in these years was the peripheral Western countries, which did not experience the same boom observed in most of the west in the 1950s and 1960s, but their economic boom came in later decades due to the emerging tourism sectors in Europe's south, and the investment in high-tech goods in Ireland. In contrast, GDP per capita in the East Bloc more than doubled between 1950 and 1973 but changed little in the non-Soviet states by 1998 and dropped by more than one-third in Russia and the Soviet-successor states.