Perhaps this is difficult to measure and maybe not even a good metric for anything meaningful, but what was the GDP and GDP per capita for nations around the world immediately before World War II? Immediately after World War II?
Are there any good sources of GDP statistics, especially for the major combatants?
I know this is an old post but for some time I've wanted to revisit this topic, so I did some digging. It turns out OECD has a data table (2003. The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD)) that I've seen as a source in a paper from Berkeley and London School of Economics (http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/series/sfb-649-papers/2008-68/PDF/68.pdf). I'm guessing the source is reliable enough for most purposes.
Here is the link: http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/historical_statistics/horizontal-file_03-2007.xls
And for the people too lazy to make their own graph, here is the GDP per capita for the major powers. I left out China because although it was a big country involved in the war, I didn't want their low numbers to mess up the graph.
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Germany was indeed poorer than UK before the war but not far behind France.
I find it interesting how WW2 was detrimental to many of the economies on the short run but after a decade or two they all caught up to their trend lines.
By 1940 for the allies the national GDP figures were approximately (in dollars):
Source: http://historum.com/blogs/guaporense/994-economics-world-war-two.html
The most comprehensive source for historical GDP per capita data is the Angus Maddison database. Here is the latest (Jan 2013) update: Excel file link.
I extract from this Maddison database 1930-1950 GDP per capita data for the major combatants: Google spreadsheet. I include only France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the USSR, the USA, China, and Japan. No data for China, 1939-1949 and the USSR, 1941-1945.
Chart below:
