Modern capitalist planning

French style economic planning has become an export product, and it has captured the market once dominated by American lectures on the virtues of a free-enterprise economy and Soviet sermons on the necessity for central planning. Claims for the 'French model' reduce to two contentions. It is effective, and it is inoffensive.

The first contention - its efficacy - is supported by correlation and imitation. France has now had her economic plan for more than twenty years, and during that time the French economy has maintained an average rate of growth of gross national product of 4-5%. This rate is substantially superior to those of Great Britain and the United States during the fifties, and quite com parable to that of the Soviet Union during the sixties.¹ The British study and imitate the French Plan. American city and regional planners draw models of it. Eastern European econo mists continually visit the Planning Commission's offices in Paris. The Common Market talks about a French Plan for Europe, and the European Left thinks it significant enough to view it as a paradigm model of post-war European capitalism.

The second contention - the inoffensiveness of French planning - is based on claims that French planning is characterised by a minimum of coercion and bureaucracy and a maximum of private decentralised decision-making and flexibility. In brief, it proclaims the total compatability of French style planning and modern capitalism. Proponents of the plan argue that some variant of the French model-the middle way between coercive central planning and unchecked private enterprise - has become a necessary element in a Western, democratic régime.