Economic Planning and Programming in Western Europe

Economic planning is back on the agenda. The climate crisis, the management of the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Union’s travails and national contexts indicate that economic planning for the medium and long terms has once again become an important issue for policymakers and academics alike.

Taking Western Europe as its geographical frame, this volume investigates the experiences and practices of economic planning in their domestic and transnational settings since 1945. The meaning of the term ‘planning’ remains elusive, polysemic, at times even contradictory, and liable to provoke strong reactions both among its supporters and its opponents. In this volume, economic planning is understood in broad terms as attempts to coordinate economic policies and organise ex ante the economic development of a given territorial jurisdiction. Rather than treating economic planning as a synonym for greater state intervention, the volume presents it as a contested repertoire of practices for reconciling economic freedom, social purpose and democratic politics.

Written by specialists in the field, the volume intertwines case studies that focus on national examples (Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Norway) and transnational experiences (the European Coal and Steel Community, the European Economic Community, the European Union). In doing so, the book explores what national and transnational experiences in Western Europe, and their comparison tell us about the nature and practice of economic planning, and how the experience of ‘programming’ at the European level developed.

The book will be of interest to researchers in postwar economic and social history, European integration history as well as sociology, political science and economics.