The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program

J. Bradford De Long and Barry Eichengreen
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: James Bradford DeLong ()

No 3899, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The post-World War II reconstruction of Western Europe was one of the greatest economic policy and foreign policy successes of this century. "Folk wisdom" assigns a major role in successful reconstruction to the Marshall Plan: the program that transferred some $13 billion to Europe in the years 1948-51. We examine the economic effects of the Marshall Plan, and find that it was not large enough to have significantly accelerated recovery by financing investment, aiding the reconstruction of damaged infrastructure, or easing commodity bottlenecks. We argue, however, that the Marshall Plan did play a major role in setting the stage for post-World War II Western Europe's rapid growth. The conditions attached to Marshall Plan aid pushed European political economy in a direction that left its post World War II "mixed economies" with more "market" and less "controls" in the mix.

Date: 1991-11
Note: ITI IFM
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Published as in Rudiger Dornbusch, et. al. (eds.) Post-World Warr II Economic Reconstru-ction and its Lessons for Eastern Europe Today, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3899.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Programme (1993)
Working Paper: The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program (1992)
Working Paper: The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program (1991)
Working Paper: The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Program (1991)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3899

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w3899

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().