Curt Tarnoff

Although many disparate elements of Marshall Plan assistance speak to the present, it is questionable whether the program in the main could be replicated in a meaningful way. The problems faced now by most other parts of the world are so vastly different and more complex than those encountered by Western Europe in the period 1948-1952 that the solution posed for one is not entirely applicable to the other.

Some aspects of the Marshall Plan are more replicable than others. The Plan was chiefly characterized by its offering of dollar assistance targeted at productivity, financial stability, and increased trade. This, however, is the aim today of only a portion of U.S. economic assistance to the developing countries, much of which goes for humanitarian relief or political security purposes. Surely developing and former communist countries would benefit by receiving large scale aid if it eliminated the necessity of going even deeper into debt to private or public sources. Such grant aid could make radical policy reforms politically easier to adopt. However, many developing countries may not possess the human, industrial, or democratic base to make effective use of such aid and may need long term development-oriented aid, not a short term infusion of capital. Some suggest that, in many cases, a rapid infusion of large scale assistance would lead only to corruption and abuse of aid funds.