After the Second World War both imports and exports increased dramatically from their pre-war levels.

Until about 1970 industry was the most important sector of the economy, but it was then overtaken by the service sector, which dominates today.

Large numbers of foreign workers, in particular Italians, started arriving in Switzerland in the 1950s. The influx dipped in the 1970s as a result of recession caused by the oil crisis, but picked up again in the 1980s.

Internal movement

It was not only Italians who arrived in the search for work. A certain amount of internal migration also took place.

As the Jura industrialised, for example, it attracted migrants from other cantons. Large numbers came from Ticino. The original Ticinese immigration, at the end of the 19th century, had brought labourers and almost all the migrants were men, but from the 1940s to the 1970s the watch-making and machine tool industries needed unskilled labour and women started coming too.

Conditions were so different from those in Ticino that many felt they were in a foreign country - and often found themselves treated as foreigners by their fellow Swiss.