Economic planning in noncommunist countries

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; 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: 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 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 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” 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 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.