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Mostrando postagens com marcador Plano Marshall. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Plano Marshall. Mostrar todas as postagens

domingo, 26 de abril de 2020

Plano Marshall? - Marcos Mendes (FSP)


Plano Marshall?

Fórmula parece não diferir da política instituída em 2010, que levou país à queda de 7%

Marcos Mendes
Folha de S. Paulo, 25 abril 2020
O governo anunciou um “Plano Marshall” para recuperar a economia após a pandemia.
O Plano Marshall é visto como uma bem-sucedida injeção de dinheiro público na reconstrução da infraestrutura da Europa após a 2ª Guerra Mundial, que teria aberto as portas para mais de duas décadas de crescimento acelerado.
O primeiro esboço do plano brasileiro aponta para aumento do investimento público, isentando projetos prioritários do teto de gastos. Há sugestão de pular etapas do processo de planejamento para os investimentos saírem mais rápido. Serão colhidas opiniões de empresários sobre os incentivos a setores considerados prioritários.
Essa fórmula parece não diferir da política instituída a partir de 2010, que levou o país à queda de 7% no PIB entre 2014 e 2016. O que se viu foi investimento público malfeito, com base em projetos apressados, queda de produtividade e disparada da dívida pública.

O general Braga Netto (Casa Civil) e Paulo Guedes (Economia) durante evento no Palácio do Planalto - Pedro Ladeira - 31.mar.2020/Folhapress
Naquela ocasião, estávamos em melhor forma fiscal, colhíamos os benefícios do boom de commodities, e a economia mundial estava em crescimento. Será que daria certo agora, em condições mais adversas?
Não só o diagnóstico que embasa a proposta parece equivocado. Também inadequada é a sua comparação com o Plano Marshall.
Esse plano representou uma injeção de dinheiro dos EUA nos países da Europa. Que país seria o patrono do Brasil?
Nós, mesmos, é que vamos financiar os projetos? Mas vamos sair da pandemia com a dívida e o déficit do governo em 90% e 8% do PIB, respectivamente!
Não contabilizar os investimentos no limite de gastos não significa que eles não vão aumentar a dívida. Haverá, isso sim, descrédito dos indicadores fiscais. Outro problema da fracassada tentativa recente.
Pressionar ainda mais o Tesouro provocará fuga de capital e aumento do custo de financiamento da dívida, travando a retomada do crescimento.
J. Bradford de Long e Barry Eichengreenmostram que a real importância do Plano Marshall foi ter funcionado como um atrativo oferecido pelos EUA para induzir a Europa Ocidental a retornar para a economia de mercado.
Durante a guerra, os governos se acostumaram a políticas intervencionistas. Havia o temor de que deixar o mercado voltar a funcionar poderia gerar outra depressão, como a dos anos 1930.
O comunismo prosperava na vizinhança e induzia os políticos a manter as práticas de guerra, tais como controles de preços, racionamentos de divisas e o planejamento central.
Na Europa pós-guerra, todos os segmentos sociais queriam recuperar renda e patrimônio destruídos e pressionavam seus governos por ajudas e subvenções, levando a endividamento público e inflação.
O dinheiro dos EUA aumentou o tamanho do bolo, permitindo uma distribuição de perdas menos draconiana entre os diversos setores da sociedade. Viabilizou a estabilização macroeconômica, a construção de um novo pacto social e reformas pró-mercado.
Muito pouco foi gasto em infraestrutura. A maior parte da ajuda financiou déficit preexistente.
Ao lado da “cenoura”, a ajuda havia um “porrete”. O uso do dinheiro tinha que ser aprovado pelos americanos, que eram os gestores do plano, e o faziam com mão de ferro. A França teve seus fundos retidos enquanto não adotou uma política de equilíbrio fiscal. Da Alemanha exigiu-se o saneamento da estatal de transporte ferroviário.
Os gestores do plano também induziram a abertura econômica e a integração dos países europeus, bem como a construção de um bom ambiente de negócios. O investimento privado e a produtividade dispararam. O setor privado foi o responsável pelo sucesso econômico.
O Plano Marshall foi indutor das reformas de que o Brasil precisa. Teremos que fazê-las por iniciativa própria, sem a tutela de um interventor externo. Não será fácil desenhar um acordo social de repartição dos custos com a renda em contração. Fundamental não reincidir em erro que cometemos tão recentemente.
Marcos Mendes
Pesquisador associado do Insper, é autor de 'Por que É Difícil Fazer Reformas Econômicas no Brasil?'

segunda-feira, 23 de abril de 2018

Plano Marshall e reconstrução da Austria: Günter Bischof, Hans Petschar - book review

Aos 70 anos da criação da OECE, que administrou o Plano Marshall na Europa, este livro constitui uma grande adição (estrito e lato sensos) à bibliografia.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Buchanan on Bischof and Petschar, 'The Marshall Plan: Saving Europe, Rebuilding Austria' [review]

by System Administrator

Günter Bischof, Hans Petschar. The Marshall Plan: Saving Europe, Rebuilding Austria. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Publishing, 2017. 336 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-60801-147-6.
Reviewed by Andrew N. Buchanan (University of Vermont)
Published on H-Diplo (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach (Bronx Community College, The City University of New York)

The bibliographic details of this book should probably include its size (9.5” by 12”) and its weight (five pounds). This is a physically impressive book, and its sheer size, beautiful design, and lavish illustration suggest a work intended for display on coffee tables rather than use in academic studies. Yet the authors are both senior scholars of Austrian history and of the Marshall Plan in particular. Günter Bischof is the Marshall Plan Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and Hans Petschar is a historian and librarian at the Austrian National Library and the holder of the 2016-17 visiting Marshall Plan Chair at the University of New Orleans. Their credentials suggest that the authors have something more than a coffee table book in mind, and as it weaves its way through the pages of photographs their text offers a serious scholarly appreciation of the working of the Marshall Plan in Austria.
Austria found itself in an ambiguous—not to say dangerous—position at the end of World War II. The occupation of the western part of the country by Allied armies and of the eastern part by the Soviet Red Army ensured that, like Germany, Austria would be subject to a four-way partition and military occupation. The strictures of Austrian geography left both the capital, Vienna, and the country’s traditional industrial heartland in Soviet hands. Austria also shared long borders with Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia, all of which emerged from the war in the Soviet sphere, into which they were ever more firmly integrated in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Much of Austria’s prewar trade was with these countries, and ties between them remained strong; in the south, Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia laid claim to the southern Austrian province of Carinthia. As Bischof and Petschar show, these considerations forced Austria’s postwar government, formed in November 1945 as a “grand coalition” between the conservative People’s Party and the moderate Social Democratic Party, to walk a fine line. Austrian leaders wanted to avoid provoking Moscow into imposing a German-style partition, but at the same time they clearly recognized the economic and political benefits of pursuing integration into the American-dominated Western European bloc.
Bischof and Petschar discuss the evolution of American postwar aid to Austria in some detail, beginning with the emergency supplies of food delivered by the US Army, by the United Nations Relief and Recovery Administration (UNRRA), and by the privately organized Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe (CARE) that helped to stave off starvation during the desperate winter of 1945-46. After UNRRA operations were wound up, Washington stepped in directly, assuming responsibility for the Austrian trade deficit in January 1947. From there, American aid developed through the well-known steps, marked by Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s speech at Harvard University in June 1947 sketching out the main outlines of what would become the Marshall Plan; by the July 1947 meeting in Paris to discuss that plan, at which the continent clearly split into two hostile blocs; and by congressional approval of the Foreign Assistance Act that set up the European Recovery Program (ERP) the following summer.
As Bischof and Petschar show, Austrian leaders were adept at leveraging the difficult and complex situation in which they found themselves to maneuver between the emerging US and Soviet blocs in ways that maximized inflows of American aid while giving Austrian politicians a great deal of control over how that aid was deployed. In Austria the Marshall Plan produced “strange bedfellows,” with US “capitalist Marshall Planners cozying up to Socialist state planners” to secure American funding for heavy industry and large-scale power generation projects (pp. 128-29). At the same time, the Austrian government nationalized Nazi-funded plants like the steel mill at Linz in order to shield them from Soviet demands for reparations in the form of “German assets” (p. 128). To some extent, American support for these statist projects reflected a globalization of New Dear corporatism, but despite its short-term utility it was an approach that contradicted Washington’s increasingly forceful commitment to free trade and unregulated markets.
Tensions between American policymakers and Austrian politicians mounted as American policy shifted towards a new emphasis on rearmament and increased productivity in the light of the intensification of the Cold War and the outbreak of hot war in the Korean peninsula. American policymakers railed against what they viewed as Austria’s archaic corporatist “chamber state” and its semi-socialist business practices, and they did not shrink from threatening to withdraw aid in order to push through reforms (p. 167). Nevertheless, actual reforms were slow to materialize, and Austria continued to receive a disproportionate share of ERP funding. In 1951-52 American pressure to “stabilize” the Austrian economy finally provoked a severe political crisis that culminated in 1953 in new elections (p. 130). While the postwar Socialist Party/People’s Party coalition continued to govern, Julius Raab’s leadership signified a more market-friendly orientation, and by 1954 an Austrian economic miracle “of sorts” was underway (p. 230). Self-sustaining economic growth, boosted by the dramatic expansion of a tourist industry funded by the ERP, allowed the “American aid drip to end,” and American policymakers proudly “claimed victory” in their nine-year struggle to modernize the Austrian economy (p. 239). The following year, and based on a pledge of permanent neutrality, negotiations for the State Treaty that formally reestablished Austrian sovereignty were finally concluded, and the postwar military occupation ended. Satisfied that Austria would not become a forward bastion of NATO, Moscow supported the treaty. Faced with a deepening split with Yugoslavia, Soviet leaders had already quietly shelved their support for Tito’s claims on Carinthia.
For all its undoubted strengths as a blow-by-blow history of the operation of the Marshall Plan in Austria, however, Bischof and Petschar’s account remains locked in historiographical tropes that are—to say the least—a little dated. Throughout the book, the Marshall Plan/ERP is presented as an act of unalloyed and unambiguous American generosity, an approach summarized in the book’s subtitle (“Saving Europe, Rebuilding Austria”) and in its dedication to the “generous American taxpayers” who “unselfishly”—and no doubt largely unknowingly— funded Austria’s postwar recovery. The authors do acknowledge that “revisionist” historians mounted a “searing critique of American ‘penetration’ of the Austrian economy” that gained a “foothold in Austria” in the 1990s (p. 15). The implication is that it no longer needs to be taken too seriously. Beyond a few cursory references, critical analysis of the construction of America’s postwar hegemony has little salience here. Instead, US involvement Austria’s early postwar history is presented simply as a positive memory that needs to be “cultivated and kept alive” in ways that pay due homage to “American aid and postwar generosity” (p. 15).[1]
If this silence on the complexities and ambiguities of America’s postwar policy is troubling, so too is the absence of any discussion of the complexities and ambiguities of Austria’s own prewar and wartime history. Austrian politics during the decade of the Great Depression were marked first by the establishment of a homegrown rightist—or “Austrofascist”—government in 1934, and then by the widely supported Anschluss, or “joining,” of Austria and Nazi Germany in 1938From 1938 until the end of the war, the former state of Austria was known as Ostmark and integrated directly into the greater German Reich. As Bischof and Petschar explain, Berlin invested heavily in the industrial development of the western Ostmark—a region considered relatively safe from Allied bombing—and much of this new plant and equipment survived the war (p. 24). Wartime industrialization, later augmented by American investment, shifted the country’s economic center of gravity away from Vienna. As German investment poured in, 1.3 million men from the Ostmark were conscripted into the German military, serving on the same basis as those from elsewhere in the Reich. Nearly 250,000 of them were killed.[2]
The ongoing discussion over the degree to which Ostmark/Austria was willingly integrated into the Nazi Reich has important implications for understanding the development of Washington’s postwar relations with Austria, and hence for the Marshall Plan. Yet, while as John Boyer notes there is now “general skepticism” among scholars regarding the “ambivalent motives of the founders of the Second Republic,” none of this finds expression here.[3] This is an important omission. A degree of shared amnesia with regards to Austria’s immediate past was common to both Austrian and American leaders, and it played a critical role in setting the ideological framework for Austria’s incorporation in the postwar order in Western Europe. Beginning with the declaration of the Allied foreign ministers issued in Moscow in October 1943, the “polite fiction” that Austria was an unwilling “first victim” of Nazi expansionism was a key foundational element of both the new postwar sense of Austrian identity and of the development of American policy towards Austria.[4] In the context of rapidly deepening tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, Austria’s postwar leaders were able to use the political space created by this shared fiction to secure disproportionately large amounts of US aid and, more importantly, inclusion into the postwar economic order taking shape in Western Europe. This shared fiction thus paved the way for the success of Washington’s effort to, as David Ellwood puts it, “remake” Austria and to secure its “anchorage in the West.”[5] Moscow had no answer to Washington’s economic power or to its pervasive and carefully cultivated cultural influence, and the Soviets’ “depredations” (as Bischof and Petschar unfailingly call them) of the Austrian economy through the seizure of (allegedly) German assets in its occupation zone only reinforced elite allegiance to the West (pp. 52, 58, 101). Of course, not everyone agreed, but in this account communist-led working-class protests are safely marginalized as mere “riots” (pp. 35, 52, 90).
I do not raise this question to prettify Soviet policy, but simply to suggest that the motives of the US policymakers who spent the money coughed up by “generous” American taxpayers and of the Austrian politicians who drew a convenient veil over their country’s recent past, must also be weighed a little more critically. The notion of remaking a foreign country through the twin levers of military occupation and economic aid should necessarily raise some fundamental questions of hegemony, sovereignty, and national self-determination, but none of these complexities register here.
Whatever the limitations of the text, the numerous pages of photographs offer a unique pictorial insight into postwar Austria. They include some arresting images: a picture of families returning to Vienna carrying huge bundles of firewood collected in the surrounding countryside is particularly striking. The illustrations are well integrated into the text, particularly in a compelling section on the work of Yoichi R. Okamoto, head of the United States Information Services (USIS) Pictorial Section in Vienna. In this section Bischof and Petschar reflect upon America’s growing cultural influence in Austria by highlighting Okamoto’s “highly imaginative” work and how it inspired a “cohort” of young Austrian photo artists (p. 201). Okamoto’s photos, supported by colorful graphic depictions of the impact of various ERP projects, helped to sell the Marshall Plan to the Austrian people. Over four hundred photos, many of them reproduced here, documented the Train of Europe’s forty-day tour of Austria. During the tour, over four hundred thousand Austrians visited the exhibitions housed on the train, where they were presented with a vision—as Bischof and Petschar describe it—of “a free Europe in a free world, based on democratic principles and supported and guided by the US economy” (p. 207). That vision is on full and sumptuous display here, and its graphic content alone makes this a book that your library should acquire. It is, however, a vision that the authors do not examine critically.

Notes
[1]. Works including Reinhold Wagnleitner’s Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War, trans. Diana M. Wolf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Gene R. Sensenig’s Österreichisch-amerikanishe Gerwerkschafts-beziehungen (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein Verlag, 1987); Hannes Hofbauer’s Westwärts: Österreichs Wirtschaft im Wiederaufbau (Vienna: Vlg f Gesellschaftskritik, 1992); and Arno Einwitschläger’s Amerikanische Wirtschaftpolitik in Österreich 1945-1949 (Vienna: Boehlau Verlag, 1998) appear in a footnote and in the bibliography but have no apparent salience in the text.
[2]. Richard Germann, “Austrian Soldiers and Generals in World War II,” Contemporary Austrian Studies 17 (2009): 29.
[3]. John W. Boyer, “Power, Partisanship, and the Grid of Democratic Politics: 1907 as the Pivot Point of Modern Austrian History,” Austrian History Yearbook 44 (2013): 168.
[4]. Tom Buchanan, Europe’s Troubled Peace, 1945-2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 88.
[5]. David W. Ellwood, The Shock of America: Europe and the Challenge of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 337, 384.

Citation: Andrew N. Buchanan. Review of Bischof, Günter; Petschar, Hans, The Marshall Plan: Saving Europe, Rebuilding Austria. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. April, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50939
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

sexta-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2015

China, investimentos: nao tem Plano Marshall, e sim o imperialismo ocidental de um seculo atras

Interessante artigo do ex-diplomata Marcos Troyjo na FSP desta sexta-feira, consolidando os últimos dados sobre a exportação de capitais da China nos últimos anos.
Discordo, porém, fundamentalmente, da assertiva quanto a um Plano Marshall chinês. Isso não existe, e não há nada de equivalente entre o que fizeram os EUA entre 1947 e 1953 -- colaborando generosamente com a reconstrução europeia, e também japonesa em outro esquema -- e o que estão fazendo hoje os chineses, que nada mais fazem do que reproduzir o que fizeram europeus e americanos cem anos atrás em direção de toda a periferia integrada aos circuitos da divisão internacional do trabalho.
A China está cuidando dos seus interesses nacionais, com algumas prebendas aqui e ali, que se refletem na construção de hospitais e prédios públicos em países africanos (desde que feitos com mão de obra chinesa), para permitir o estabelecimento dos mesmos esquemas de extração de valor que faziam os "imperialistas ocidentais" no final do século 19 e início do 20.
A China está certa? Provavelmente.
Mas ela não está fazendo nenhum Plano Marshall, e isso precisa ficar muito claro.
Nunca existiu nada comparável aos dons generosos feitos pelos EUA, e mesmo antes do Plano Marshall. Os acordos de Lend-Lease (empréstimos e arrendamento), que permitiram a transferência de mais de 50 bilhões de dólares em equipamentos militares americanos para os britânicos, para os soviéticos e para outros aliados (inclusive o Brasil), foram absolutamente essenciais para resistir, desde 1940 no caso inglês, à máquina de guerra nazista, e vencer os monstros fascistas-militaristas da Segunda Guerra.
A China está longe, muito longe, de fazer qualquer Plano Marshall. Ela cuida dos seus interesses nacionais, o que certos países são incapazes de fazer.
O comércio bilateral Brasil-China, por exemplo, é bem mais "colonial" do que jamais o foi nossa relação diversificada com os "imperialismos" europeu e americano durante décadas.
O que acaba de fazer agora a Argentina abrindo-se aos capitais chineses senão submissão colonial?
Essa é a realidade.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Plano Marshall chinês?
Marcos Troyjo
Folha de S. Paulo, Sexta-feira, 27 de fevereiro de 2015

Os astutos chineses já encontraram fórmula para explicar como sua expansão representa oportunidades

Quando o Muro de Berlim caiu, Brasil e China ocupavam fatias iguais do PIB global -- cada uma representava 3% da economia mundial.

Hoje, a participação brasileira permanece essencialmente a mesma, ao passo que a China já é responsável por quase 17% da riqueza global.

A dramática ascensão chinesa é mais destoante quando comparada à imobilidade brasileira. Embora inerte, o Brasil de 2015 ainda é a segunda maior economia emergente.

Essa corrida chinesa rumo ao status de superpotência econômica se deveu sobretudo ao extraordinário sucesso na aplicação de uma estratégia de nação comerciante.

Isso gerou perceptível desproporção da presença chinesa em diferentes âmbitos das relações econômicas internacionais.

O gigantismo comercial da China, que há dois anos converteu-se na maior exportadora -- e importadora -- do mundo, não se fez acompanhar do papel do país como grande fonte de investimentos estrangeiros diretos. Isso, porém, está mudando.

Uma comparação entre os perfis dos membros do "G2" (EUA e China) do mundo contemporâneo ilustra o ponto. A corrente de comércio exterior anual da China hoje é de US$ 4 trilhões. A dos EUA é de US$ 3,9 trilhões.

Já o estoque total de investimento no exterior demonstra grande disparidade. Na ponta receptora, a China ultrapassou os EUA em 2014 como principal destino mundial de investimento estrangeiro, (China US$ 127 bilhões, EUA US$ 86 bilhões). Na ponta emissora, a desproporção é brutal: EUA contabilizam US$ 6,5 trilhões e China menos de 10% disso, com US$ 614 bilhões.

Ainda assim, a tendência é de maior convergência. Nos últimos 10 anos os EUA aumentaram seu estoque de investimentos não-financeiros no exterior em "apenas" 75%, enquanto a China os multiplicou 12 vezes.

Será então, como questiona o economista Peter Nolan, da Universidade de Cambridge, que a "China está comprando o mundo"?

À semelhança do Japão nos 1980, a China realiza crescentes aquisições de empresas e propriedade imobiliária no exterior. Investe pesadamente em energia e, onde lhe permitem, em terra, subsolo, agricultura. E o faz globalmente. Se os investimentos chineses são particularmente visíveis na África, em volume os quatro principais destinos na última década são EUA, Austrália, Canadá e Brasil.

A China sabe que seu perfil cada vez mais alto como investidora no exterior gera agudas preocupações. Empresariado local teme competição e desindustrialização. Governos sensibilizam-se com eventual perda de soberania sobre recursos naturais. Trabalhadores ressentem-se do estilo supostamente abrasivo com que os chineses administram suas empresas.

Mas os astutos chineses já encontraram fórmula sútil de explicar como a expansão de seu papel investidor representa oportunidades para o mundo em desenvolvimento.

Classificam plataformas lideradas por Pequim como o Banco dos Brics, o Banco de Investimentos em Estrutura na Ásia ou o Fundo da Rota da Seda, juntamente com o investimento estatal e privado no exterior, como equivalentes a um "Plano Marshall chinês".

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/colunas/marcostroyjo/2015/02/1595596-plano-marshall-chines.shtml

sexta-feira, 15 de junho de 2012

Plano Marshall e a Grecia de hoje: verdadeiras e falsas analogias - Albrecht Ritschl

Este post necessita ser lido em conjunção com este outro, no qual eu argumentava contra as falsas analogias entre a atual crise financeira europeia -- feita de sobre-endividamento de Estados soberanos -- e a depressão dos anos 1930, feita de ruptura de pagamentos por Estados que tentavam se defender de uma crise, e uma depressão econômica causada por suas próprias más respostas a uma simples crise de bolsa, em 1929, e a uma devastadora crise bancária, a partir de 1931, quando eles decretaram inconversibilidade das moedas, aumentaram o protecionismo econômico, suspenderam pagamento de dívidas e desvalorizaram erraticamente suas moedas.
O post anterior é este aqui: 

QUARTA-FEIRA, 13 DE JUNHO DE 2012

O atual é muito mais interessante, pois se trata de uma reflexão econômica sobre como foram resolvidos os problemas do passado e o que se necessita fazer hoje.
Claramente, para mim, a Grécia e outros países, se encontram na mesma situação da América Latina no início dos anos 1980, quando todos os países tinham tomado enormes recursos externos -- os tais petrodólares reciclados a juros extremamente reduzidos em nosso favor -- e ficaram sem condições de pagar, quando os juros foram elevados pelo Fed. A saída, depois de muita controvérsia sobre as perdas, depois de inúmeros empréstimos-ponto dos próprios bancos credores (para pagar unicamente os juros devidos) e depois de muita choradeira, foi a que se tem de fazer nesses casos: juntar todas as dívidas velhas, trocar por novos a 30 anos, dar um desconto do principal e converter o que sobrou (50% ou mais, ou menos, depende), em novos títulos da dívida em diferentes modalidades de pagamento, com valor face e juros fixos baixo, com valor reduzido e juros flutuantes ou outras fórmulas.
É isso que se está fazendo com a Grécia, e é isso que Portugal talvez necessite. Diferentes são os casos da Irlanda e da Espanha. A Itália, bem a Itália é um problema muito maior, mas o país tem condições de assumir os custos de seu desperdício durante muitos anos.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida 


Free exchange

Economic history

Germany, Greece and the Marshall Plan

The Economist, Jun 15th 2012, 13:48 by Albrecht Ritschl | London School of Economics
Albrecht Ritschl is professor of economic history at the London School of Economics and a member of the advisory board to the German ministry of economics.
OLD myths die hard, and the Marshall Plan is one of them. In the New York Times of June 12th German economist Hans-Werner Sinn invokes comparisons with the Marshall Plan to defend Germany’s position against Eurobonds, the pooling of sovereign debt within the euro zone. His worries are understandable, but the historical analogy is mistaken, and the numbers mean little. All this unnecessarily weakens his case.
Mr Sinn argues against Germany’s detractors that Marshall Aid to postwar West Germany was low compared to Germany’s recent assistance, debt guarantees etc. to Greece. While Marshall Aid cumulatively amounted to 4% of West German GDP around 1950 (his figure of 2% is too low but that doesn’t matter), recent German aid has exceeded 60% of Greece’s GDP, and total European assistance to Greece is now above 200% of Greek GDP. That makes the Marshall Plan look like a pittance. And it strips all the calls for German gratitude in memory of the Marshall Plan off their legitimacy. Or does it?
What Mr Sinn is invoking is just the outer shell of the Marshall Plan, the sweetener that was added to make a large political package containing bitter pills more palatable to the public in Paris and London. The financial core of the Marshall Plan was something much, bigger, an enormous sovereign debt relief programme. Its main beneficiary was a state that did not even exist when the Marshall Plan was started, and that was itself a creation of that plan: West Germany.
At the end of World War II, Germany nominally owed almost 40% of its 1938 GDP in short-term clearing debt to Europe. Not entirely unlike the ECB’s Target-2 clearing mechanism, this system had been set up at Germany’s central bank, the Reichsbank, as a mere clearing device. But during World War II, almost all of Germany’s trade deficits with Europe were financed through this system, just as most of Southern Europe’s payments deficits towards Germany since 2008 have been financed through Target-2. Incidentally, the amount now is the same, fast approaching 40% of German GDP. Just the signs are reversed. Bad karma, that, isn’t it.
Germany’s deficits during World War II were mostly robbery at gunpoint, usually at heavily distorted exchange rates. German internal wartime statistics suggest that when calculated at more realistic rates, transfers from Europe on clearing account were actually closer to 90% of Germany’s 1938 GDP. To this adds Germany’s official public debt, which internal wartime statistics put at some 300% of German 1938 GDP.
What happened to this debt after World War II? Here is where the Marshall Plan comes in. Recipients of Marshall Aid were (politely) asked to sign a waiver that made U.S. Marshall Aid a first charge on Germany. No claims against Germany could be brought unless the Germans had fully repaid Marshall Aid. This meant that by 1947, all foreign claims on Germany were blocked, including the 90% of 1938 GDP in wartime clearing debt.
Currency reform in 1948—the U.S. Army put an occupation currency into circulation, and gave it the neutral name of Deutsche Mark, as no emitting authority existed yet—wiped out domestic public debt, the largest part of the 300% of 1938 GDP mentioned above.
But given that Germany’s debt was blocked, the countries of Europe would not trade with post-war Germany except on a barter basis. Also to mitigate this, Europe was temporarily taken out of the Bretton Woods currency system and put together in a multilateral trade and clearing agreement dubbed the European Payments Union. Trade credit within this clearing system was underwritten by, again, the Marshall Plan.
In 1953, the London Agreement on German Debt perpetuated these arrangements, and thus waterproofed them for the days when Marshall Aid would be repaid and the European Payments Union would be dissolved. German pre-1933 debt was to be repaid at much reduced interest rates, while settlement of post-1933 debts was postponed to a reparations conference to be held after a future German unification. No such conference has been held after the reunification of 1990. The German position is that these debts have ceased to exist.
Let’s recap. The Marshall Plan had an outer shell, the European Recovery Programme, and an inner core, the economic reconstruction of Europe on the basis of debt forgiveness to and trade integration with Germany. The effects of its implementation were huge. While Western Europe in the 1950s struggled with debt/GDP ratios close to 200%, the new West German state enjoyed debt/ GDP ratios of less than 20%. This and its forced re-entry into Europe’s markets was Germany’s true benefit from the Marshall Plan, not just the 2-4% pump priming effect of Marshall Aid. As a long term effect, Germany effortlessly embarked on a policy of macroeconomic orthodoxy that it has seen no reason to deviate from ever since.
But why did the Americans do all this, and why did anyone in Europe consent to it? America’s trauma was German reparations after World War I and the financial mess they created, with the U.S. picking up the bill. Under the Dawes Plan of 1924, Germany’s currency had been put back on gold but Germany went on a borrowing binge. In a nutshell, Germany was like Greece on steroids. To stop this, the Young Plan of 1929 made it riskier to lend to Germany, but the ensuing deflation and recession soon became self-defeating, ending in political chaos and German debt default. A repetition of this the Marshall Planners were determined to avoid. And the U.S. led reconstructions of Germany and Japan have become the classical showcases of successful liberal intervention.
So does Greece, does Southern Europe need a Marshall Plan? Is Sinn right to say that Greece has already received one—or a 115-fold one, as he argues? The answer to first question may be yes, in the limited sense that a sweeping debt relief programme is needed. The answer to the second question is a resounding no. Greece has clearly not received a Marshall Plan, and certainly not 115 of them. Nor has anyone else. As far as historical analogies go, what Southern Europe received when included in the euro zone was closer to a Dawes Plan. And just like in Germany in the 1920s, the Southern Europeans responded with a borrowing spree. In 2010 we didn’t serve them a Marshall Plan either, but a deflationary Young Plan instead.
This latter-day Young Plan is not even fully implemented yet. But we see the same debilitating consequences its precursor had around 1930: technocratic governments, loss of democratic legitimacy, the rise of political fringe parties, and no end in sight to the financial and economic crisis engulfing these states, no matter how many additional aid packages are negotiated. Woe if those historical analogies bear out.
Europe should learn from history. But it needs to learn fast. There might be no recovery unless debts are reduced to manageable proportions. That is what ended the Great Depression in Europe in the 1930s, and that is what in all likelihood is needed again. Professor Sinn is right to resolutely ask for action on this, even if his take on the Marshall Plan is wrong.