LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Marshall Plan: Aid
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The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan is coming up in June of 1997. Transitional societies and communities, with the bulk of human population and increasingly uncertain futures, dot the surface of the earth in this time of rapid global change. The original Marshall Plan efforts of 50 years ago as well as the traditional aid programs of the late 20th Century, are being found to be increasingly insufficient to address the tasks of improving and sustaining the health and prosperity of those living in these transitional societies and communities.
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[T]he real upshot of the Marshall Plan was a political maneuver to loot American taxpayers to keep influential American corporations on the government dole. The Plan's legacy was the egregious and perpetual use of foreign aid for domestic political and economic purposes.
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Despite all this evidence, the supposed success of the Marshall Plan retains a life of its own. This is unfortunate because it diverts attention from more effective principles of recovery. Foreign aid in the form of gifts discourages sound economic policy, which is the most important determinant of economic growth. Manipulating how the aid is given is ... an irresistible temptation for the politicians of the donor nation; using it to political advantage is a temptation for the receiving government. Then, as now, some countries that receive aid from the U.S. are asking that instead they should simply be given an opportunity for free trade.
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The Marshall Plan ended in 1951, as originally scheduled. Any effort to extend it was halted by the growing cost of the Korean War and rearmament. U.S. Republicans hostile to the plan had ... gained seats in the 1950 Congressional elections, and conservative opposition to the plan was revived. Thus the plan ended in 1951, though various other forms of American aid to Europe continued afterwards.
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Countries that received Marshall Plan aid and joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade significantly out-performed those that only got foreign aid dollars. A group of five countries that received Marshall Plan aid (or significant foreign aid in the case of Japan) and that joined GATT enjoyed annual average GNP growth of 8.3 percent from 1947 through 1955, and unemployment of 2.6 percent. (Germany, France, Japan, Britain, Sweden.) Four countries that received significant Marshall aid, but were not part of GATT for much of the period, had GNP growth of 3.7 percent, and 7.6 percent unemployment. (Italy, Denmark, Austria, Greece).
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Later analyses of the Marshall Plan have disagreed fundamentally with this favorable interpretation, and have offered more skeptical views. An older literature interpreted the Marshall Plan largely as an American export program, inspired by Keynesian fears about stagnation in the U.S. post-war economy. At times enriched with a good dose of political Anti-Americanism, this interpretation was quick to assume that Marshall Aid primarily served the interests of U.S. big business.
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