L'aide aux pays de l'Est: les leçons du Plan Marshall

[eng] It has recently been argued that the post-war Marshall Plan experience could be repeated for the Eastern countries now. Against this, recent historical studies have shown that the Marshall Plan was less effective than it has been claimed and should not therefore be used as a justification for economic aid to the East today. We compare the situation of Western Europe at the time with the current one in Eastern Europe from the point of view of the physical states of the economies, the attitudes to economic policy, the problems of internal stability and of external trade and payments. In particular, we look at the process of transition to control-free economies with externally convertible currencies. We come to two principal conclusions. Firstly, while the productive sector of Western European economies was probably already on the way to recovery, this is not true in the East today. The case for aid for reconstruction is therefore stronger than it was then. Secondly, the political will, coupled with a natural economic tendency to reach regional economic integration, allowed Western at the time to achieve a gradual transition to multilateral payments convertibility through the succesful creation of a payments union. However, the conditions for such a choice do not seem to be present Eastern Europe today. However, the alternative route of a direct passage to convertibility is likely to produce an unstable situation there is a substantial external injection of liquidity. [fre] On a récemment suggéré que l'expérience du plan Marshall après la guerre pourrait être renouvelée aujourd'hui pour les pays de l'Est. Il semble toutefois, selon des études historiques récentes, que le plan Marshall ait été beaucoup moins efficace qu'on ne l'a prétendu et que cette expérience ne devrait donc pas être citée pour justifier l'allocation d'une aide économique à l'Europe de l'Est. Cette étude compare la situation économique de l'Europe occidentale à l'époque du plan Marshall à celle(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)