L'economia europea e il piano Marshall

The aim of the paper is to explore why the Marshall Plan was so successful. International aid has proved generally wasteful: which were the specific circumstances that allowed the Marshall Plan to avoid thepitfalls that condemned so many later experiences? The paper points out that when it was announced the Plan did not exist and policymakers were forced to improvise. It shows that local elites were allowed to choose very different ways to spend the resources received, although there was strict control to avoid theft and corruption. Furthermore, at the time there was no specific economic theory that was universally accepted and the peculiar institutional structure of the Marshall Plan allowed great flexibility in its implementation.