The Paradox of Planning in World War II

Hugh Rockoff

Departmental Working Papers from Rutgers University, Department of Economics

Abstract: According to the standard accounts of the mobilization of resources in the United States during WWII, things went badly in the beginning because the agencies in charge were given insufficient authority and were mismanaged. But then in 1943 the story continues, the War Production Board installed the famous Controlled Materials Plan which solved the major problems and turned disaster into triumph. A reexamination of the Plan in the light of information on munitions production, however, reveals that the Plan was too little and too late to account for the success of the mobilization. One implication is that pecuniary incentives may have played a larger role than has been recognized.

Keywords: Controls; World War II (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N1 N4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996-08-26
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sas.rutgers.edu/virtual/snde/wp/1995-13.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:rut:rutres:199513

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Departmental Working Papers from Rutgers University, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().