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National Aptitudes for Planning in Britain, France, and Italy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Jack Hayward
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Extract

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF NATIONAL ECONOMIC PLANNING WAS fashionable in the 1960s at a time when the French model had become extremely popular in Western Europe. However, analyses of planning experience were then generally inhibited by a preoccupation with descriptions of the formal planning procedures rather than with any serious attempt to assess anything but the economic consequences of planning. (Andrew Shonfield's classic study of Modern Capitalism was a conspicuous exception to this criticism.) Attention was focused on plans as official documents rather than upon a set of planning practices that might be only remotely related to any formal statement of public policy. Planning was viewed too much from the forecasting end rather than the implementation end and the rationality of objectives became more of a preoccupation than the practical problems of translating them into reality. A normative model of efficient decision-making was all too often assumed to be readily transposable because of a wholly unrealistic notion of the ways in which organizations work.

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Article
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , 01 October 1974 , pp. 397 - 410
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1974

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References

* This article consists for the most part of a substantially shortened version of the introduction to a book entitled Planning, Politics and Public Pofiv, the British, French and Italian Experience, edited by Jack Hayward and Michael Watson to be published early in 1975 by the Cambridge University Press. Its preparation was financially supported by the SSRC. Professor Ghita Ionescu gave his encouragement to the project at its inception in 1968.

1 Lindblom, C. E., ‘The science of “muddling through”’, Public Administration Review, XIX, Spring 1959, especially pp. 80–6Google Scholar. See also C. L. Schultze, The Politics and Economics of Public Spending, 1968, chapter 3 passim. This reversal of the Lindblom criteria was suggested in a preliminary working paper by Bernard Cazes.

2 Dror, Y., ‘Comprehensive Planning: Common Fallacies versus Preferred Features’, in Van Schlagen, F. (ed.), Essays in Honour of Professor J. P. Thijsse, 1967, p. 98 Google Scholar.

3 A. Shonfield, Modern Capitalism, 1965, chapter 6 passim. See also A.A. Rogow and P. Shore, The Labour Government and British Industry, 1945–51, 1955, Chapter 2.

4 R. Opie, ‘The Making of Economic Policy’ in H. Thomas (ed.), pp. 61 cf. pp. 56–7; cf. W. Plowden, The Motor Car and Politics in Britain, 1971, 1973 ed., pp. 435–6, 439–40.

5 Henderson, P. D., ‘Government and Industry’, chapter 10 in Worswick, G. D. N. and Ady, P. H., The British Economy in the 1950s, 1962, p. 374; cf. Opie, R., in Thomas, H., pp. 64, 71–4Google ScholarPubMed.

6 PEP, Growth in the British Economy, 1960, p. 223, cf. 222.

7 Shonfield, op. cit., pp. 85, 73.

8 Blank, S., Industry and Government in Britain. The Federation of British Industries in Politics, 1945–65, 1973, pp. 168–9, 213 Google Scholar, chapter 6 passim. On the inadequacies of British trade associations, see Report of the Devlin Commission of Inquiry into Industrial and Commercial Representation, Association of British Chambers of Commerce/Confederation of British Industry, November 1972.

9 Bailey, R., Managing the British Economy. A. Guide to Economic Planning in Britain since 1962, 1968, p.137 Google Scholar. ‘At no stage was there any machinery forensuring that policy decisions and actions of particular Ministries were consistent with the aims of the NEDC growth programme’. (Ibid., pp. 37–8.)

10 Allum, P. A., Politics and Society in Post‐War Naples, 1973, p. 26 Google Scholar note. See also Radice’s, J. ‘The Incomplete Miracle, an Economic Survey of Italy’, The Economist 15 04 1972, pp. 13, 22, 24, 39 Google Scholar.

11 LaPalombara, J., Italy. The Politics of Planning, 1966, pp. 44; cf. pp. 36–48 Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., pp. 3 3–5 and chapter 4 passim. See also Edelman, M. and Fleming, R. W. The Politics of W’age‐Price Decisions, 1965, pp. 76–7.Google Scholar

13 Edelman and Fleming, pp. 74–5, 293.

14 Ibid., pp. 106, 113. On Confindustria, see LaPalombara, J., Interest Groups in Italian Politics, 1964, especially pp. 266–71Google Scholar and chapter 8 passim and on IRI, Holland, S. (ed.), The State as Entrepreneur, 1972, especially pp. 39–42, 81–91, 104–12, 218, 312–14Google Scholar.