even education. What is common to all these is that they can be purchased with money. Thus, the more capital an individual (or an economy) has, the more and better equipment they will have, and, thus, the greater their product will be. Those who referred to what was happening in the Israeli economy as an "economic miracle" were not amazed by the fact that it successfully met the challenges described above, nor by the ability to raise resources worldwide for this purpose. Most of these economists were not even aware of this. Rather, what amazed them were the statistics that Israel recorded: an unprecedented achievement of rapid growth of the national product over the period of a generation, with an average rate of 10% in the years 1948-1973. There have been economies with higher growth rates, just as there were economies that maintained long periods of growth. But there was no other country that was able to maintain such high growth rates over so long a period. Thus, we can now appreciate the nature of the "miracle": the rare combination that took place in Israel of rapid growth of the work force, as a result of mass immigration, and a massive influx of capital that the country succeeded in raising. Each wave of immigration, whose initial absorption represented an economic burden on the Israeli economy, turned into a blessing when these immigrants joined the circle of production - thereby contributing towards increasing the national product - in a relatively short period of time, thanks to the capital that could be made available for this purpose The rapid growth that characterized the country's first twenty-five years came to an end with the Yom Kippur War in 1973, due, among other things, to the drop in the rate of growth of the population. The average annual number of immigrants to Israel fell from about 42,000 in the years 1970-1973 to about 22,500 in the remaining years of the decade, and to about 12,500 in the 80s. The growth rate...
