User:Pricey/Sandbox1
The Great Collapse was a significant period of worldwide economic downturn during the early 20th century, affecting most countries across all continents. The Great Collapse began in 1913 with the collapse of the Weisstadt Stock Exchange, at the time the world's largest, on October 16, 1913, which sent stock prices plummeting, particularly those in Euclea. The Sunrosian Monarchy, a quickly industrialising economy, defaulting on its debts is also considered by economists to be a major cause of the Great Collapse, particularly around the period of the Airdale War.
The quickly fluctuating prices spread to many of Euclea's largest cities, and impacted heavily industrialised countries particularly badly. The Great Collapse is generally said to have ended at the start of the Great War in 1926, although evidence of major economies recovering was observed as early as 1919. To this day, the Great Collapse is the largest depression, both by economic loss and future impact, in history.
The Great Collapse was amplified by the sharp decline in international trade experienced by most Euclean countries as goods and services began to be preserved around 1914, severely affecting countries reliant on international trade, causing worldwide tariffs to rise drastically. Due to this, many trading jobs, such as import and export-related jobs, began extremely fragile, and large amounts of unemployment were seen in these sectors. Physical labour and agricultural jobs were also hit particularly hard by the Collapse, with countries relying on large agricultural outputs, particularly Narozalica in Euclea, experiencing large amounts of economic decline.
Cause
Spread
Socio-economic effects
Euclea
Narozalica
In 1913, Narozalica's main exports consisted of agricultural and industrial products. As such, it was hit badly by the Great Collapse, with unemployment reaching as high as 27% in 1918, including a record-high 39% in Velzemia, then a part of the empire, in the same year. Civil unrest increased within the empire throughout the 1910s and in the 1920s, with President Artyom Freček being voted out significantly by the populace for his poor policies regarding the Collapse, to be replaced with the incumbent Vladislav Pudovkin. Pudovkin created funds to help the unemployed and struggling, and employed many people in producing military equipment for the Narozalic Armed Forces, with an estimated 7% of the workforce being employed by the government's military camps in 1923. Increases in poultry and meat produce in the mid-1920s allowed the Narozalic economy to post its first positive numbers in December 1924, the first time economic growth had been witnessed since 1913.
Pudovkin's economic policies are often considered autarky due to the sharp decrease in international trade that followed, as well as the policies of self-reliance that emerged throughout Narozalica's western Euclean sphere, mainly within the empire itself, but included some other countries such as Amathia, who also experienced significant economic decline due to the Collapse.