28 Months to Go

The Marshall Plan has been in existence for almost half of its allotted life span of four years. In Paris last week, OEEC released its second annual progress report on the state of Western Europe's economy. The 378-page report contained a justly prideful appraisal of past achievement, and a hopeful but carefully hedged prediction for the future.

In the two years since the ECAid began, Western Europe's industrial production (excluding Germany's) had risen to about 15% above the 1938 level. The dollar gap (the amount by which Europe's imports from the dollar area exceed her exports to it) had been narrowed from $8.5 billion in 1947 to an estimated $4.5 billion for 1950. Western Europe's economic strategists generally think that by 1952, when ECAid ends, they will have narrowed the gap further, and will have achieved a "manageable" economy--if:

P: The U.S. will shell out $5 billion more during ECA's two remaining years (this is approximately the amount that ECA's blueprint has called for all along).

P: U.S. business activity continues at a high level.

P: Exports to the U.S. can be increased by about 50%.

But even if the conditions of these big ifs are fulfilled, OEEC's "manageable" economy after 1952 will not mean balanced trade between Europe and the U.S. A gap of at least $2.5 billion will remain. The Marshall Plan, OEEC's report points out, is incapable of reversing a world trade trend that has been developing for almost half a century; i.e., since the U.S. began outproducing and outselling the rest of the world's great industrial nations.

The OEEC report gives Europe's businessmen hardheaded warning that they must become better salesmen in the dollar market, learn something about U.S. marketing and advertising. The report pays tribute to the idea of Western Europe's economic integration; it also shows that Western Europe has so far failed to take any major steps toward integration.

Paul Hoffman, who for months has been asking Western Europe to lower import quotas, establish an effective intra-European payments plan and end dual pricing (TIME, Nov. 7 et seq.), believes that so far OEEC has done little more than pay lip service to his program. Europeans must get a move on toward working out economic integration, quit approaching that vital problem as though Europe had at least 28 years in which to solve it. The cold fact is that Europe has only 28 months.

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