Since the end of World War II in 1945, most noncommunist 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, 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, 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.

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.