Fossil fuels have shaped the European economy since the industrial revolution. In this paper, we analyse the effect of coal and oil on long-run economic growth, exploiting variation at the level of European NUTS-2 and NUTS-3 regions over the last century. We show that an "oil invasion" in the...

Western Europe experienced a Golden Age of economic growth from the early 1950s to the early 1970s during which the average rate of growth of real GDP per person was just over 4 per cent per year. When viewed through the lens of growth accounting the fast growth of the Golden Age was based on...