the process by which key economic decisions are made or influenced by central governments. It contrasts with the laissez-faire approach that, in its purest form, eschews any attempt to guide the economy, relying instead on market forces to determine the speed, direction, and nature of economic evolution.

By the late 1960s the majority of the world's countries conducted their economic affairs within the framework of a national economic plan. But in the 1980s the theory and practice of economic planning went through a crisis. In the developed market economies the rate of economic growth slowed from the very high levels reached in the 1960s and '70s, and unemployment rose significantly. At the same time, public confidence in the ability of governments to influence for the better the performance of the economy diminished. As a result, the popularity of national economic plans waned and the scope left to the free play of market forces widened. In developing countries, forms of economic planning practiced earlier yielded disappointing results characterized by the growth of heavy state bureaucracies and inefficient public enterprises. In these countries also, although the role of the state remained preponderant, market forces were increasingly relied upon to improve economic performance. In the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and its satellites, the backward state of the economy and widespread examples of waste and inefficiency led to attempts to introduce more market solutions into the process of economic planning. These attempts proved largely unsuccessful, however, and the inherent rigidity of the Soviet economic model proved an important factor in the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself, beginning in 1989.

Historically, the idea of central economic planning was associated with the criticism of capitalism as a system of anarchy and greed. Marxist critics did not give much thought to how the economy would be run after capitalism had been abolished; most of them professed to see no difficulty in organizing the society that would follow. When in 1917 the new Soviet government found itself the owner of all the means of production, it had no blueprint as to what to do next. The evolution of central economic planning (command economy) in the Soviet Union was largely a pragmatic affair; methods were tried and discarded, and new ones were introduced. The decision in 1927 to undertake rapid and large-scale industrialization required the centralizing of control, since only the government could undertake the task of marshaling the productive resources of the country to achieve its ambitious aims.

In western Europe, economic planning is adapted to a diversified economic structure, a dynamic class of business managers, and a long tradition of political and economic liberty. Consequently, although planning implies an extension of the economic responsibilities and activities of the state, the mainspring of economic growth remains the private sector. Only rarely does the state intervene directly in the affairs of individual firms. Economic planning remains indirect and takes the form of collaboration between the public and the private sectors. Producers and consumers are free to adapt their activities to changes in market conditions and relative prices. In the 1980s there was a general trend for governments to sell state-owned enterprises to the public and to reduce the extent of public regulation of particular sectors, such as air transport.

Communist (communism) methods of planning after the mid-1950s entered a state of flux, and the highly centralized administrative type of planning inherited after World War II from the Soviet Union by all the newly established Communist states underwent considerable modifications. In Yugoslavia planners followed policies very different from those of the Soviet model, and differences also emerged in the practice of other eastern European countries. In the Soviet Union itself, a debate concerning the most appropriate means for implementing plans went on for some years, but, despite numerous efforts on the part of the government to reorganize the machinery of planning, the fundamental drawbacks of central economic planning were never overcome. The Soviet Union's attempts in the late 1980s to reform its planning machinery had the unintended effect of bringing down the whole structure of central economic planning, and with it the Soviet government itself. By the early 1990s the post-Communist governments of eastern Europe and of the states of the former Soviet Union had begun making a painful transition to the diversified economic structure typical of the economies of western Europe.

In the meantime, the knowledge of the Soviet-bloc countries' long-standing difficulties had given rise in many developing countries to a repugnance to Soviet planning methods, while the methods used in the developed non-Communist countries were felt to be not directly applicable, either. There was consequently no settled planning doctrine in the developing countries, and the approach of governments remained empirical. In practice, this meant that the state played a major role in setting up new industries and in modernizing agriculture, particularly in countries of recent independence. The state budget was a major source of savings, supplemented frequently by the local currency counterpart of foreign aid. But the absence of a highly qualified civil service placed limits upon the extent and efficacy of state action. Thus, in urban areas, privately owned businesses continued to supply most local consumer goods. In agriculture, peasant proprietorship or large private estates—particularly for export products—remained the general rule.

The kind of economic planning that was practiced in the Soviet Union and in most other Communist countries until the 1990s had developed during the 1920s and '30s in the struggle to industrialize the U.S.S.R. The Bolsheviks (Bolshevik) had seized power in 1917 without any clear notion as to how an economy should be run. No guidance was to be found in the writings of Karl Marx (Marxism) other than the assertion that a socialist (socialism) society would operate the economy for the common good, which suggested that it would create organs of economic administration to replace the market system of capitalism. In the future Communist society there would be no money, no profit motive. No wages would be necessary to stimulate effort. It would be “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” economics, a science of exchange relationships or value, would wither away or be replaced by a kind of higher management. The Bolshevik leader N.I. Bukharin (Bukharin, Nikolay Ivanovich) wrote in 1920:

The leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin (Leninism), shared these somewhat utopian expectations. It is not clear from his pre-1917 writings just what kind of economic organization he had in mind for Russia should he achieve power. As it turned out, the Russian Revolution of October 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917) was accompanied by economic breakdown, a refusal of cooperation from officials and managers, civil war, and uncontrollable inflation. Partly under the stress of these circumstances, partly from ideology, the Bolsheviks moved to establish thoroughgoing state control over industry and trade, nationalized (nationalization) all economic property including land, declared all private enterprise illegal, and demanded that the peasants deliver all farm surpluses to state procurement organs. Money lost all value.

On paper, this period of War Communism, as it is now called, was one of centralized planning. All economic units, except the peasant producers, were subjected to orders from the government's Supreme Council of National Economy (V.S.N.Kh.). But this initial essay in planning was a failure—except insofar as it facilitated the concentration of the few available resources for the civil war fronts. Rationing functioned spasmodically, there was famine, and output fell drastically.

In 1921 Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP). Small-scale private manufacturing, private trade, and free sale of peasant surpluses became legal once again, while the state retained the “commanding heights” (e.g., large-scale industry, foreign trade, banking, transport). The state sector continued to be operated under the aegis of V.S.N.Kh. by trusts and enterprises with state-appointed managers. In 1921 the State Planning Committee ( Gosplan) came into existence to advise the government and its economic alter ego, the Council of Labour and Defense, but planning was still a shadowy process. Trusts and enterprises had considerable autonomy and were free to make agreements and grant credits to one another. The planners made forecasts, and government policy decisions influenced the level and direction of state investments; but there was no integrated system of production and allocation planning, even in the state sector, while the private sector was not directly planned at all. In 1924 only 35 percent of the national income, 1.5 percent of agricultural production, less than half of all retail trade, and three-quarters of industrial output were “socialized”; the rest was private.

In 1926–28 a vigorous discussion raged about the future basis of planning. Two schools of thought developed, one advocating “genetic” and the other “teleological” planning. The former, composed of the more moderate and cautious planners, believed that plans should be based on existing trends in the economy and reasonable projections thereof. The latter considered that drastic measures were necessary to speed up the industrialization of the country, and this “teleological” school produced extremely ambitious drafts of the First Five-Year Plan. The radicals conceived the plan as taking precedence over all previous economic decisions so as to enable a sharp break with the past. With the support of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, it was their view that won.

The First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), which was later said to have been carried out in four years, called for immense investments in heavy industry; for example, steel output was to be more than doubled by 1932. Amid great confusion, the planning mechanism was overhauled, and gradually a “ command economy” was established. In this system, subordinate units of the economy (e.g., industrial enterprises) operated in accordance with administrative instructions, and they did not decide their inputs or outputs by negotiation with other enterprises, these being determined by the planners. The sole effective criterion of management decision became conformity to plan—i.e., to the instructions issued by the central administrative planning organs. In this way, the political authorities achieved a high degree of control over resource allocation (allocation of resources) and were able to enforce their priorities. Consequently, when the First Five-Year Plan ran into trouble, the government was able to insist on the fulfillment of most of the plans for key sectors of heavy industry, at the cost of a drastic fall in availability of consumers' goods.

A rearrangement of the planning system was the necessary consequence of the new tasks it was called upon to perform. In 1932 three People's Commissariats (for heavy, light, and timber industries) replaced the V.S.N.Kh.; these were further split, and by 1939 the industries of the U.S.S.R. were run by 21 People's Commissariats (the numbers varied in subsequent years). Each commissariat (renamed ministry in 1946) controlled a branch of industry, either directly or through a ministry in one of the union republics. The ministries issued instructions to “their” enterprises, organized the supply of materials and components, and also disposed of the output.

At the apex of the system stood the leaders of the Communist Party (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), who decided the policy objectives in economic as in other matters and who made choices as to the means of achieving those objectives. All key appointments in the economic hierarchy were made or confirmed by appropriate party committees.

It was Gosplan's task to “translate” the politically determined objectives into a consistent set of plan targets. There had to be coherence between production and supply at all times, as well as between investment plans and the current production of capital goods. Foreign trade also had to be taken into account, as a drain on available resources (exports) and as a source of needed goods (imports). The planners proceeded by drawing up a series of material balances, which expressed anticipated supply (supply and demand) of, and demand for, all key commodities. The successive versions of the plan were revised until a general balance was attained, since it was no use planning an increase in production of any item if the necessary additional machinery, raw material, and fuel could not be made available. The task was of special complexity in the short term (i.e., within a period of a year), since the plan had to take the form of millions of consistent instructions to thousands of enterprises to produce, deliver, transport, and process millions of commodities of a great many shapes, sizes, and types.

Needless to say, all these decisions must be made somewhere in all economic systems. The Soviet type (Stalinism) of “command economy” developed under Stalin (Stalin, Joseph), however, provided no criterion for decentralized (devolution) decision making such as is provided, however imperfectly, by the market mechanism in Western capitalist countries. Consequently, the coordination of all these decisions had to be consciously achieved by the planners. In practice much depended on proposals from below, since the planners suffered from information overload. The actual plans were necessarily aggregated (e.g., tons of metal, millions of square metres of cloth, millions of rubles' worth of construction or of furniture), so that decisions on the product mix were necessarily decentralized. The resultant malfunctioning came to be much criticized in the Soviet press. Quality was often sacrificed in order to fulfill the plan in quantitative terms; planned targets expressed in tons, for example, encouraged excessive weight in the product concerned, while targets expressed in rubles discouraged economy and rewarded the use of expensive materials. Plan-fulfillment as a dominant criterion of success stimulated management to conceal their productive potential so as to get an “easy” plan, while fears of supply shortages encouraged hoarding. Soviet critics increasingly pointed to the rigidity of prices, which did not reflect supply–demand conditions. The planners claimed that it was their task, not that of the price mechanism, to ensure balance between supply and demand, but the enormous complexity of their task made it impossible for them to do so.

Low growth rates in the late 1970s and early '80s, on top of continued shortages and corruption, alarmed the Soviet leadership. Many proposals were aired as to how the system might be changed. A series of reforms were in fact promulgated (notably in 1965 and 1974), but these were soon criticized as having been inconsistent and halfhearted.

The program of reform proposed and undertaken in the period 1987–90 under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev (Gorbachev, Mikhail) represented a truly radical change in the nature of the Soviet system, the first since the early 1930s. In this program it was intended that the bulk of the product mix would be decided not by the planners but by management, in negotiation with their customers or with the wholesale-trade organs. The need for competition was explicitly recognized, both between state enterprises seeking customers and between them and newly legalized cooperatives (more or less free enterprises). Enterprises were to be protected by law against arbitrary exactions by their superiors. An end was decreed to “soft” credits and subsidies, leaving open the real possibility of bankruptcy. Large enterprises were to be allowed direct access to foreign markets.

Reforms along these lines were gradually introduced, but some formidable obstacles proved impossible to surmount. One was chronic shortage, which continued to stimulate hoarding and compelled the continuation of material allocation. Prices were only slowly and with difficulty reformed. The declared aim of speeding up growth led to the survival of growth targets, in the familiar units of rubles, tons, and square metres, although the reformers aimed to abolish such targets. The priority of centrally determined objectives was assured by the system of so-called gos-zakazy (state orders), and these could cover the major part of the output of many enterprises. There were, moreover, serious problems of ideology (the enhanced role of the market came into conflict with traditional Marxist views) and bureaucratic resistance. Deeper reforms that were proposed threatened the fundamental powers of the Communist Party and its officials. In the meantime, the central government watched its authority over economic decision making steadily erode at the republic and regional levels, largely owing to Gorbachev's more liberal policies. Central economic planning ceased to have any meaning as many enterprises, effectively freed from government oversight, tried to cope in an economy that as yet lacked the free play of market mechanisms. With the collapse of the Soviet central government in late 1991, economic policy-making devolved upon Russia and the other newly independent republics of the former union, most of whom appeared committed to a diversified economic structure in which central planning would play a much-reduced role.

Agricultural planning in the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) had a peculiarly difficult history. With priority given to industrialization, agriculture during the regime of Stalin was essentially treated as a source of cheap food and materials for the cities. The peasants (peasant) were, in fact, expropriated by force in the period 1930–35, and the bulk of them were compelled to join collective farms (kolkhozy (kolkhoz)). While in Soviet ideology state farms (sovkhoz), operated like factories with wage labour, were preferred to collective farms, they remained of relatively minor importance until after 1954. Mechanization was for many years confined to a very few crops and especially to grain growing. The entire system was primarily designed to ensure deliveries of produce at low prices, and the planners and administrators concentrated on procurements, while production plans were seldom, if ever, fulfilled. Under Nikita Khrushchev (Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeyevich) in the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a substantial change of policy, with greatly improved prices and a major investment program designed to restore agriculture to health.

This policy was continued under Leonid Brezhnev in the 1960s and '70s. Despite very large investments and higher farm prices, however, output rose slowly and costs rose quickly, necessitating very large subsidies. Peasant incomes rose, but incentives to work on the large state and collective farms were ineffective, and millions of townspeople had to be mobilized annually to help with the harvest. An important reform was the spread within state and collective farms of the use of autonomous work groups that were paid according to results. In 1987, proposals were adopted that would allow the leasing of land to families over and above the small plots and privately owned livestock that most rural residents had and that even as late as 1986 were producing 25 percent of the Soviet Union's entire agricultural output.

As the authority of the central government crumbled in 1990–91, many state and collective farms gained de facto control over their own affairs, though few used this to any distinct advantage. More profound changes seemed likely as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and would probably involve the reversion of farmlands to private ownership in some republics.

In other Communist-ruled countries the Soviet system was extensively copied, even in minor details, until 1956. After that date much depended on choices made by the party leadership of each country. Both Yugoslavia (in the 1960s) and China (in the 1980s) decentralized control over major sectors of their economies and introduced individual incentives on a significant scale. The Soviet Union's satellites in eastern Europe, by contrast, maintained fairly rigid centralized controls until 1989–90. At that time, the Soviets abandoned their political-military control over the region, and most eastern European countries used the opportunity to begin moving toward a free-market economic system, however haltingly and even painfully.

Poland's unsound economic policies in the 1970s led to serious domestic imbalances and a growing foreign debt and contributed to the political-economic crisis of 1980–81. Martial law, imposed in 1981, made possible the imposition of a very sharp rise in consumer prices, and the regime then adopted a radical reform designed to greatly strengthen the market mechanism. Its implementation, however, was delayed by the chronic shortages and imbalances inherited from the previous period. It is noteworthy that the bulk of agriculture in Poland remained dominated by private peasant smallholders, who were free to sell what and when they wished. Beginning in 1990, the new post-Communist government of Poland abandoned price controls and subsidies and undertook a major currency reform in a drastic program to convert the Polish economy to a free-market basis. The privatization of the larger state-owned enterprises proceeded relatively slowly, however, as in other eastern European countries.

Czechoslovakia's centralized economic system was in the process of being reformed in 1968, when fears of more fundamental political change brought about Soviet military intervention, which had the side effect of halting the economic reform process. Following the events of 1989–90, Czechoslovakia moved in the same general direction as Poland. State subsidies on many items were reduced, prices were decontrolled, and the private ownership of industrial and commercial enterprises and of farmland was legalized and even encouraged. Larger industrial enterprises were converted to joint-stock companies, and their shares were sold to the public.

East Germany's industrial planning was based upon a set of monopolistic cartels (Kombinate), which had considerable autonomy in carrying out the tasks of satisfying the needs of domestic customers and of export markets. Perhaps because of traditional German organizational skills and work ethic, the system was more efficient in operation than those of most other countries in the Soviet bloc. It remained woefully inefficient by the standards of the free-market economies of western Europe, however, as became clear following West Germany's historic unification with East Germany in 1990. When deprived of their state subsidies, most eastern German industries proved unable to survive in free competition with those of western Germany or with other European Community countries. As a result, eastern Germany's rapidly shrinking industrial sector quickly came to depend on subsidies from the German government and on massive new plant investment by corporations based in western Germany.

Of all the Soviet-bloc nations, it was Romania that most fully retained Stalinist methods, both in the economy and in politics, into the 1970s and '80s. Unsound economic policies led to a long-lived situation of crisis and acute shortages, especially of energy and even of food. The resulting widespread deprivation sparked a popular uprising in 1989 that overthrew Romania's longtime leader, Nicolae Ceauşescu. But, as in some other eastern European nations, the end of Communist rule in Romania was followed by a sharp economic decline: the closing of unprofitable state-supported industries resulted in falling production and rising unemployment, while shortages of food and other consumer goods continued and even worsened.

In 1968 Hungary adopted a system of market socialism that left each enterprise management very largely free to determine its own production program. The central planners were no longer to set obligatory production targets. While some prices remained controlled, others were set free. Enterprises were also given some freedom to buy and sell abroad, and efforts were made to link Hungarian prices with those on world markets. Profits became the principal measure of managerial success, and bonuses based on profits had an appreciable effect on managers' and workers' incomes. Large-scale investments were still controlled by the central planners, but the enterprises were required to finance roughly 40 percent of all investments out of their own resources.

Balance of payments difficulties and internal pressures (e.g., for subsidies to unsuccessful enterprises), however, led to severe strains, and output and living standards stagnated after 1978. Agriculture, however, dominated by genuinely autonomous cooperatives and a flourishing private sector, continued to do well. Hungary also had a sizable “second economy,” with a variety of legal small-scale private enterprises.

The Yugoslav Communists developed their own conception of socialist planning after their break with Moscow in 1948. The collectivization of agriculture was abandoned in the early 1950s. The control of the state-owned enterprises was given to workers' councils that would decide their own production programs according to profitability, with prices subject to negotiation. Investments were partly controlled by the enterprises themselves out of profits or by the central planners, partly financed from bank credits. But lack of effective central control, and rivalries between national republics, gave rise in the 1980s to a serious economic crisis led by a rapidly rising rate of inflation. These economic difficulties foreshadowed Yugoslavia's breakup in the early 1990s.

Chinese Communist planning at first followed the Soviet pattern. In 1958, however, came the Great Leap Forward, an effort to speed up progress by shifting rural manpower into manufacturing. This failed disastrously, and the Chinese Communist leadership had to devise its own planning methods, adapted to a vast country with poor communications and a low stage of economic development. After the social-political cataclysm known as the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping came to power in the late 1970s and launched a major shakeup of the system. Agriculture was decollectivized, small-scale private trade and workshops were legalized, and the role of market forces was substantially increased. Larger-scale industry remained subject to central planning controls, though there, too, market-type reforms were experimented with. While there were successes, balance of payments problems and inflationary pressures continued to cause some anxiety. Agricultural output rose sharply at first, but concern over shortfalls in cereals production continued. In China, too, the search went on for the elusive optimal balance between plan and market.

The Soviet type of planning grew up under the special conditions prevailing in the U.S.S.R. and was adapted to the task of speedy industrialization of a poor country, with strong emphasis on heavy industry, explicable partly by the logic of industrialization (steel and machinery are more conducive to industrial growth than textiles and jam), partly by concern for military potential. The system (Comecon) made it easy for the authorities to attain a high rate of forced saving and investment and a rapid buildup of basic industries, though at the cost of neglecting for many years the elementary needs of the citizens. Insofar as the investment plans of most basic industries depended in the last resort on a quantitative estimate of future demand, the Soviet system was reasonably well adapted to making such estimates, since so much of the additional demand was a consequence of the planners' own decisions.

In practice, of course, Soviet-type planning was not always able to realize these potential advantages. There were repeated instances of overinvestment, followed by the abandonment or freezing of partly finished projects. Experience also showed that the separate administrative units into which a nationalized economy must be divided can take as narrow and short-term a view as any capitalist entrepreneur. Thus, the most easily accessible forests were cut, the richest sources of iron ore exhausted, and fallow land put under the plow in order to fulfill current plans, with little consideration of the consequences. A centralized system of material balances is not insurance against erroneous forecasting. The material-balances approach exercised a conservative influence, perhaps because it was simplest to plan on the assumption that the various technical coefficients would remain constant. Innovation was often resisted, and the influence of user demand was weak. It must be borne in mind, of course, that Western economies also have many imperfections. A theoretical model of centralized planning works as smoothly and as efficiently as a theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market, but neither exists in the real world.

Following the death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet economic system was presented with new problems. It showed itself unable to cope effectively with the finer adjustments required in a sophisticated industrial economy. In particular, the system was not able to stimulate the adoption of new technology despite heavy expenditure on research. It dealt very clumsily with the satisfaction of consumer demand, though this became more important in the changed political conditions, not only in the Soviet Union but also in most of its European allies. The unsuitability of the traditional Soviet planning model in a modern, highly technological, and intensely competitive world economy became painfully clear to the generation of Soviet (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) leaders who came to power in the mid-1980s. But their efforts to incorporate with socialist (socialism) planning the flexibility and grass-roots enterprise that come with market mechanisms also failed, largely because central planning had become indissolubly tied to the totalitarian structure of state power in the Soviet Union.

Since the end of World War II in 1945, most non-Communist developed countries have practiced some explicit form of economic plan. Such countries include Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Planning as a focus for economic policy-making in these countries had its heyday in the 1960s and '70s. After that time, although the formal mechanisms for working up the national economic plan remained in existence, their impact upon national economic policy-making was much diminished. Governments harboured narrower ambitions, and public opinion came to expect less from government action.

Until World War II there was no serious attempt at economic planning outside the Soviet Union. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, many governments were forced to intervene vigorously in economic affairs, but in a manner that amounted to economic warfare; this intervention took the form of giving increased protection to domestic producers against competition from abroad; of acquiescing in the formation of cartels and other arrangements among producers to raise prices and reduce competition; and of higher levels of government spending, some of it for relief and some of it for armaments.

At the end of the war there was a shift to the left in the politics of some of the countries, and with it a turn to more positive forms of government intervention. In Great Britain the Labour Party secured a large majority in Parliament in 1945, and with it a mandate for policies aiming at more social equality. In Scandinavia, particularly in Sweden, moderate left-wing traditions in government made a transition to planning politically acceptable. In France, left-wing groups, including the Communist Party (communism), emerged as the dominant political force after 1945 with programs of far-reaching social reform. More important, a group of eminent public servants, engineers, and business leaders—continuing a tradition of French 19th-century capitalism known as Saint-Simonianism—were in favour of the state taking a leading role in economic affairs.

While the initial impulse to planning came from the political left, actual decisions by governments to plan were based on practical considerations rather than on political doctrine. The decision to plan most often followed a crisis in a country's economic affairs, as was the case in France after World War II, when there was an urgent need to reconstruct and modernize the economy. In the United Kingdom the setting up of a medium-term plan accompanied the emergency measures taken to deal with a balance of payments crisis in July 1961; and the Labour government's National Plan of September 1965 was formulated in similar circumstances. In Belgium and Ireland dissatisfaction with the past performance of the economy was a major reason for planning. Belgium had not shared in the European prosperity of the 1950s, and accordingly, in 1959, the government adopted a plan aimed at an increase of 4 percent a year in the GNP, practically double the rate achieved from 1955 to 1960. Its planning methods were modeled on those of France.

The French example also influenced planning in other European countries. In Great Britain a Conservative government undertook, during a balance of payments crisis in July 1961, to set up a National Economic Development Council to draft a five-year economic plan that would emphasize much more rapid economic growth. The Netherlands (Netherlands, The), which had been very successful since the war in achieving balanced economic growth, initiated five-year plans in 1963 through the medium of the Central Planning Bureau, which had for some years been advising on national budgetary policies. Italy had first turned to planning in the 1950s, when a plan for the development of southern Italy was launched; later, attempts were made to extend this example of regional economic planning into a plan for the national economy. Even in West Germany, where the Christian Democratic governments had emphasized a policy of strengthening the free market, a need for some central management of the economy was increasingly recognized.

Economic planning in the developed countries has always been pragmatic rather than inspired by an attempt to apply preconceived ideological doctrines. In the 1980s, governments in most of these countries swung to the right of the political pendulum and were therefore less sympathetic to the idea of economic planning, which therefore took a back seat in national economic policy-making. The problems that the developed countries faced (chiefly slow growth and high unemployment) were thought not to be amenable to more state action. Indeed, the cost of financing government was thought in influential circles to be stifling private initiative. In the same way, many enterprises under public ownership were “privatized” (that is, returned to private ownership), and the scope of government regulation of the economy was notably reduced. In the view of a new generation of policymakers, the major role of government in promoting economic growth was, first, to provide a stable, noninflationary framework for enterprises to make their decisions and, second, to support the emergence of the new “information society” through improved education and technical training and research and development programs.

The plans drafted in the developed countries postulate target rates of growth and some indication of the choices to be made in allocating rates of increase to the various kinds of expenditures on available goods and services (private and public consumption, social investment, directly productive investment, stocks, and exports). Further, as the plan has to be balanced, the total of these components of overall demand must fall within the probable total available supply of goods and services, after allowing for the desired level of the current balance of payments surplus. The rates of increase of some types of demand—directly productive investment and stocks in particular—are fixed within fairly narrow limits by technological considerations once the overall rate of growth of output has been chosen. But an important area of choice concerns the respective rates of growth of private consumption by individuals and what has come to be called collective consumption; e.g., education, health, urban facilities, provision for culture.

Another planning objective that has become very prominent (and that figures in the plans of Great Britain, The Netherlands, France, and Italy, to mention only a few) is the correction of imbalances in regional development (regional development program).

One of the most important functions of economic planning is to achieve consistency among different economic objectives. Some desirable goals are likely to conflict with others. While it may be possible, for example, to stimulate the economy so as to obtain sharply higher levels of output and employment, the measures required to do this may also produce rapidly rising prices, which in turn will lead to rising imports and falling exports; the result may be a balance of payments crisis.

One of the chief merits of national planning is that it publicizes the choices before a country and encourages discussion of them. In France the Parliament is consulted on the broad outline of the five-year plan, which is presented in terms of a number of alternative balanced sets of objectives. More government spending on social services, for example, can be shown as implying a slower rise in individual incomes after taxes, or—a rather more difficult choice to make explicit—a higher growth rate can be shown as requiring greater willingness on the part of producers and consumers to adapt themselves to changes in markets and technology.

In other countries the choice of objectives may be left to the government, which thus makes the plan a part of the program upon which it will stand or fall at the next election. Or the government may prefer to detach itself almost entirely from the plan. In West Germany, where planning is less explicit, projections of economic trends are set out in a technical document that does not have the formal status of a government draft and circulated to the governments of the Länder (states) and to employers and trade unions. Such projections are thought to have some influence on public thinking and on the expenditure plans of business and government. In Great Britain, when the Conservatives returned to power in 1970, there was less enthusiasm for public discussion of planning objectives than there was under the preceding Labour government. The Dutch procedure is to leave the main responsibility for drafting projections of economic trends to the Central Planning Bureau. In that country, however, business and labour have generally been ready to take account of such projections when drawing up their own plans. In Belgium, after the period of strained relations between the main language groups during the 1960s, regional considerations have been very much to the fore in all planning discussions.

An important issue for the European countries in the late 20th century has been the impact on their economies of the European Economic Community (European Community) (Common Market) and the aim of achieving a single, unified market by 1992.

Since targets in this type of planning do not constitute orders to producers and consumers to do or not to do particular things, the plan has to take account of what private firms say they intend to do, or could do, during the period of the plan. Drafting a plan, therefore, requires arrangements for bringing the representatives of the private sector—both employers and workers—into the planning process. This is usually done by setting up a tripartite body (the High Planning Council in France, the Council for Economic Planning in Sweden, for example) where representatives of the private sector are brought together with representatives of the government.

Government departments in most countries draft programs several years in advance for expenditure on such public projects as education, road building, urban improvement, and hospital construction. But it often happens that these programs are not mutually consistent. One of the advantages of an overall plan is that the confrontation and coordination between the various programs has to be done in an explicit manner. The task can be difficult; watertight administrative compartments are not always easy to break down.

Efforts to incorporate into the plan all that can be known about the intentions of the private and public sectors need to be supplemented by more general economic analysis. As has been stressed already, the plan should be, above all, coherent; and the best way of ensuring this is to build up the planned targets within the framework of the national income (national income accounting) accounts. Since World War II, such accounts have been drawn up on an annual basis in all the developed countries. From this it is only a step to projecting the national accounts for several years ahead.

Earlier types of economic planning leaned heavily upon the method of economic balances. This consists of setting out the quantities of economic resources that will be available during the plan period and comparing them with the quantities demanded by the plan. Four balances are of key importance: the demand for and supply (supply and demand) of goods and services; of savings (saving); of manpower; and of foreign exchange. The notion of balance is a valuable one in planning, since no plan can be successful if it outruns the available resources. The method has its difficulties, however, because of the numerous interactions among different sectors of the economy, with the consequence that an adjustment in one set of balances requires adjustments in the others—a complex and time-consuming process. The method of balances is also unable to throw light upon a more fundamental aspect of economic decision making, the need to choose among alternative courses of action on their own merits.

Other methods of planning that have in varying degree replaced the method of balances include mathematical model making and cost–benefit analysis. A mathematical model consists of a series of equations that describes the structure and working of the national economy, enabling various sets of targets to be “tried out” by feeding their values into a computer. It is too early, however, to claim for economic models any clear superiority over the more pragmatic method of economic balances. The most systematic use of models has been in The Netherlands and France. In the Scandinavian countries, a strong mathematical tradition among economists has favoured their adoption.

Cost–benefit analysis, sometimes known as the planning–programming–budgetary system (PPBS), represents an effort to improve the planning of government expenditures. Starting from the fact that public expenditures are not sensitive to the economic considerations of price and profitability but that they nevertheless use up scarce resources (allocation of resources) that haveeconomic value, PPBS attempts to provide rules of calculation when deciding upon the allocation of these resources. A first step is to break down public expenditure into its main functions and to divide each of the latter into programs that can be identified with government policy objectives. Then an effort is made to evaluate the effectiveness of each program in achieving its declared objectives, together with a consideration of alternative ways of achieving the same objectives and the costs of those alternatives. The U.S (United States). government pioneered in the application of PPBS to government activities in the 1960s. Great Britain introduced it in the Ministry of Defence in the late 1960s and then began to extend it to other departments, particularly in education and science. In France the government decided to apply the system in 1968, first in the Ministry of Defense and then in relation to energy, town planning, and such departments as posts and telegraph. By the early 1970s PPBS had become an integral tool of national economic planning.

In their planning, all the non-Communist countries leave a large margin of initiative to individual producers and consumers; i.e., they rely upon market mechanisms rather than upon direct controls. There is no contradiction between this state of affairs and the existence of a plan. First, as already noted, the fact of associating the private sector with the drafting of the plan encourages its representatives to be dynamic in their behaviour, a prerequisite for any successful growth policy. Second, when a plan is drafted in this way, all sectors are encouraged in making their own plans to adopt the same general assumptions about the growth of the economy. In France this aspect of planning is called “generalized market research.” Third, participation in drafting the plan can help to make the representatives of the employers and workers more conscious of existing obstacles to growth and encourage them to find constructive solutions for overcoming them.

But the government is not freed from participating actively in carrying out the plan. The government's budget (government budget) and its monetary policy must be used in such a way that overall demand rises as steadily as possible along the desired growth path. The problem of avoiding checks to growth caused by balance of payments difficulties is likely to call for special attention.

There is no easy solution to the problem of how to reconcile five- or six-year plans with the need to adjust economic policy to the phases of the business cycle. In Japan, a country that has experienced several sharp though brief recessions since the end of the postwar reconstruction period, governments are willing to cut back their public expenditure programs and to take restrictive fiscal and monetary measures because they believe that the economy will soon rebound once the restrictive measures have done their work. Japan's remarkable economic growth has borne out this confidence. In the less flexible economies of western Europe, governments are more circumscribed in their action. France, Germany, and The Netherlands have instituted systematic reviews of their plan targets every one or two years and are quite prepared to revise the targets if necessary. In addition to these general measures for implementing plans, some governments attempt to influence more directly the behaviour of private firms by granting depreciation allowances for investments and tax exemptions for some activities, such as expenditure on research.

But it is in the field of regional development (regional development program) policy that governments intervene most actively to influence the decisions of the private sector of the economy. There is widespread use in western Europe of tax incentives and grants from public funds to encourage private firms to expand in less-developed regions. Frequently, permission to set up a new factory, or to expand an existing one, in already congested areas where labour shortages are acute is refused. In addition, governments endeavour to stimulate growth in the less-developed areas by improving transport facilities, housing, and urban infrastructure generally. These efforts have not shown any significant success in raising incomes or reducing unemployment in the less-developed regions. This does not mean that the regional policies have been without effect, however, for without them the regional disparities might have worsened. Present-day plans for regional development attempt to concentrate on a few selected “growth points” where it is thought that favourable geographic characteristics or the presence of raw materials or other advantages offer the most hope of success.

By the 1970s planning had become more flexible and selective than in earlier years, and the trend continued and even accelerated in the 1980s. The general consensus was that the government should seek to create the fundamental conditions that would encourage growth (economic growth); this would include measures to establish and maintain competition. The corollary was that governments should try to avoid applying detailed controls over the private sector in peacetime, since these lead to reduced efficiency.

Some critics of planning have charged that the planners put too much emphasis on measures to accelerate economic growth, overlooking the social costs involved. A difficulty with simple growth targets is that they do not measure the increase in side effects such as pollution, noise, and the destruction of nature; on the contrary, they show the expenditures on combating these effects as part of the growth itself. (For example, expenditures on conservation or smog abatement are included in the statistics of national income and GNP.) Similar contradictions are found in the easy equation of economic growth with the general welfare (welfare economics): it is possible for income per head of the population to rise while the incomes of certain groups fall; quite frequently, some groups, such as the aged, handicapped, unemployed, and certain ethnic groups, do not share in the increasing prosperity of their country. The general welfare obviously includes elements such as health, housing, education, and economic opportunity as well as economic growth. This concern with the qualitative aspects of economic growth has left its mark upon the objectives written into the economic plans, which increasingly spell out general social aims.

Governments have also adopted a more flexible approach to the setting of targets. During the 1960s, mainly under the influence of French (France) practice, targets for the private sector were often spelled out in detail. But experience showed that elaborate targets were rarely achieved, although they were likely to be considered by public opinion as representing firm commitments by the government. Since then, care has been taken to distinguish between firm targets and estimates. The firm targets are set only for areas over which governments have a considerable degree of control. While the government may have some influence on output in manufacturing industry, this depends more directly upon such things as the state of business conditions abroad, the purchasing habits of consumers, trends in prices and incomes, and so on. It is noteworthy that Japan, which holds the record for economic growth since World War II, has never used detailed output targets in its multiyear plans.

Since the end of World War II, it has become an accepted practice among the governments of the developing countries to publish their “development plans.” These are medium-term plans, usually for a five-year period. The aim is to select a period long enough to include projects spanning a number of budget years but not so long as to delay periodic assessment of the development effort stretching over a series of plans. The development plan attempts to promote economic development in four main ways: (1) by assessing the current state of the economy and providing information about it; (2) by increasing the overall rate of investment; (3) by carrying out special types of investment designed to break bottlenecks in production in important sectors of the economy; and (4) by trying to improve the coordination between different parts of the economy. Of these, the first and fourth are perhaps the most important and the least understood function of economic planning. The other two functions of planning cannot be efficiently carried out without ample and reliable information, nor without effective economic coordination between the different government departments and agencies within the public sector and the private sector. In most developing countries, information about the economy is scarce, and planning has provided the impetus to acquire and analyze the necessary data in order to provide a better understanding of the functioning of the economy. In order to improve coordination it is necessary to spread reliable economic information to indicate the future course of the government's economic intentions and activities so that the people concerned, both in the public and the private sectors, may make appropriate plans of their own to bring them in line with the government's plan. In fact, this may be regarded as the main reason for publishing development plans, although this point is not always clearly appreciated by the governments that issue them.

The newly independent countries, just starting to plan their economies, usually begin with a simple type of development plan. In most cases this is merely an ad hoc list of individually conceived social and economic projects that the various government departments have submitted for the plan. So long as the projects are well selected (say, to break some obvious bottlenecks in production) and are well designed in a technical sense, such a simple plan may be quite serviceable. But it tends to suffer from a number of weaknesses arising from insufficient coordination. (1) Since the projects are drawn up on a piecemeal basis in separate government departments, there is usually no systematic attempt to compare the relative costs and benefits of the plans proposed by the different departments on a uniform basis. As a consequence, the collection of projects included in the plan may or may not represent the most productive pattern of investing the available resources of the government. (2) A lack of coordination frequently leads to wasteful duplication and a failure to take advantage of complementary relationships between individual projects. (3) A simple listing of the projects does not provide a clear-cut system of priorities in their implementation. Typically, the projects that are relatively easy to implement are pushed far ahead of others that, although requiring a longer time to prepare and implement, may have the potential to contribute more directly to the expansion of national output and government revenue. This can have serious budgetary consequences when the projects that are easier to implement generally happen to be in the field of social welfare, education, and health and—although they may indirectly contribute to economic development in the longer run—entail a significant and ever-increasing stream of recurring government expenditure after their completion.

An obvious way of remedying these defects is to formulate a more systematic plan of the public investment program as an integrated whole. In order to do this, it is necessary to begin by making a careful estimate of the total amount and time pattern of the financial resources that the government expects to receive during the plan period from domestic sources and from external loans and aid. Next, it is necessary to make realistic estimates of the costs and benefits of the alternative investment projects within the public sector as a whole so as to select the most productive combination of projects, taking into account significant complementary relationships between the different projects. In selecting the best combination of projects to be included in the plan, it is necessary to pay special attention to the time pattern of costs and benefits. A poor country, with limited sources of government revenue, would have to discount future benefits heavily relative to the more immediate benefits and would have to give priority to the type of project with quicker returns in the form of expansion in output and tax yields over the type of project that may promise higher rates of return, but only in the more distant future.

The problems of carrying out an integrated public investment program serve to emphasize the crucial role of the annual budget in development planning. At the aggregate level, with a given amount of external aid, the stream of the total investable funds available to the government during the plan period depends on its ability to raise revenue (and borrow from domestic sources) and, equally important, to control its nondevelopment, or “consumption,” expenditure year by year during the plan period. At the individual project level, the fact that a project requires a number of budget (government budget) years to complete does not dispense with the need for annual budgetary controls to ensure that it is being implemented in stages, according to the timetable as originally planned. Indeed, it is only through the discipline of annual budgetary controls that a medium-term development plan is likely to be kept nearer the course as originally planned.

Few developing countries have submitted themselves to the budgetary discipline necessary for implementing an integrated public investment program. This has not deterred them, however, from jumping from a simple type of development plan to “comprehensive” economic planning, embracing both the public and the private sectors and regulating both the aggregate level of economic activity and its detailed composition. The drive toward comprehensive planning arises from various causes: from a distrust of the automatic working of the market mechanism and its ability to promote economic development; from a desire to assert national economic independence by government control of foreign trade and investment; and from the theories of economic development, fashionable during the 1950s, that emphasize the need for a “big push” to overcome technical indivisibilities and the need for a simultaneous setting up of a number of mutually supporting projects to enjoy the benefits of technical complementaries. The economic development plans published by the developing countries in the 1960s were fairly elaborate. The trend to “quantitative (econometrics)” planning encouraged the use of elaborate statistical estimates and projections even when the primary statistical sources on which these computations were based were often unreliable or conjectural. Advanced mathematical techniques were also increasingly employed.

Basically, there are three parts to such a development plan: (1) the target figures for increase in per capita income and consumption to be attained at the end of the plan (with estimated figures for the intermediate years during the plan); (2) estimates of the quantities of various resources, such as capital, manpower, and foreign exchange, needed to implement the target figures (including the time profile of the rate at which these resources will be required during the plan); and (3) parallel but independent estimates and projections of the quantities and the time pattern of these resources expected to be available both to the government and to the economy as a whole during the plan period. The elaborate planning documents issued by some developing countries may be described as attempts to quantify as far as possible the information required under the three heads and to test the formal consistency of the plan. This essentially consists in asking (a) whether the total amount of available resources is sufficient to meet the total requirements of resources as set by the target figures, and (b) whether the allocation of resources planned for different sectors is consistent with the detailed target figures for the increased output of different goods and services required for consumption and investment. When the resources required by some industries are intermediate goods (the output of other industries), input–output (input–output analysis) tables are frequently used to check whether the outputs of different industries are sufficient to supply not only the target figures for final use in the form of consumption and investment but also the “indirect use” required by other industries. The more advanced planning models using programming techniques in an attempt to solve the further question (c) whether the planned pattern of allocating resources is the most efficient; i.e., whether it minimizes the resources needed to meet the target figures as compared with other patterns.

In spite of increasing professionalism in the formulation of development plans on paper, the practical performance of the developing countries in implementing development plans of any complexity has not been very encouraging. Development plans, however elaborately formulated on paper, rarely get beyond the first and most obvious practical hurdle, namely, how to equate the total amount of investable resources required to fulfill the target rates of economic development set by the plan with the total supply of investable resources. This arises from the practice of starting with some minimum “politically acceptable” target rate of economic growth while optimistically assuming that the problem of providing the necessary resources will somehow look after itself. This is the opposite of realistic planning, which should start from the supply of available resources and find out the maximum possible rate of economic growth that can be got out of these resources. There also appears to be a tendency to be overly optimistic as to the availability of resources and to underestimate the costs of projects. Very often, development plans have been cut short in midstream as balance of payments difficulties arising from this optimism have led the authorities to curtail their efforts sharply. Sometimes, also, the plan may be deliberately drawn up larger than can be sustained out of the available domestic resources as an elaborate window-dressing exercise to obtain a greater amount of external aid. When external aid fails to fill the planned gap in resources, the typical reaction is not to reduce the size of the plan but to take the politically less painful (and the administratively simpler) expedient of keeping to the publicly declared target rates of the plan and then trying to fill the gap in resources out of “forced saving,” which it is hoped will be generated by budget deficits (deficit financing) and inflation. Unfortunately this “forced saving” approach has not worked in most developing countries, because the public soon loses confidence in the stability of the purchasing power of money as prices tend to rise in step with increases in government expenditure. The pressure of domestic inflation increases the pressure of demand for imports, while rising domestic production costs discourage expansion of exports.

This disequilibrium situation may be eased by raising the rate of interest to reduce the demand for investable funds and to encourage saving, and by devaluation of the currency to discourage imports and encourage exports. Some governments have done so. But many governments in developing countries generally prefer to maintain artificially low rates of interest and to supply cheap loans to the public sector and to some favoured sections of the private sector engaged in modern manufacturing industry. Many are also reluctant to devalue for fear of further raises in prices through speculation and the higher costs of imported goods. Thus many tend to rely heavily on detailed administrative controls and import licensing to ration the scarce supply of investable funds and foreign exchange. The attempt to control the entire economy in detail through a network of direct administrative controls inevitably results in inefficiency and delays, aggravated by the inadequacy of the administrative machinery and a shortage of competent civil servants. The closer the “integration” planned between different sectors of the economy, the greater the damage to efficient coordination, since delay in one sector causes widespread delays in others.

The main weaknesses of the formal “quantitative” economic development plans are that they distract attention from a variety of important qualitative factors and focus on physical quantities rather than incentives. Qualitative factors include such matters as the practical capacity of the administrative machinery to implement the plan, the degree of political stability, and the extent of public confidence in the government's willingness and ability to carry out stated aims, which are crucial for the practical success of planning. Focus on physical quantities seems to result from a perceived need to indicate target levels of output of individual commodities; it distracts from the important fact that much economic activity is undertaken within the private sector and is responsive to incentives. Plans have tended to induce efforts to implement controls over private-sector activities. These have been effective to a large extent in preventing unplanned production activities, but they have been less effective in inducing desired increases in output without the appropriate incentives. The developing countries might do much better with a less comprehensive type of planning, making a greater use of indirect controls through the market mechanism and concentrating attention on the breaking of bottlenecks, particularly to the expansion of production in agriculture and export industries. Some developing countries have in fact succeeded in attaining rapid rates of growth just by concentrating on these vital sectors of the economy without an elaborate paraphernalia of planning.