E-raamat: French Planning in Theory and Practice

Reviews of the reissue:

"Great to see this book in print again. Saul Estrin and Peter Holmes offered a crucial correction when market orthodoxy was in the ascendant, and they do so again today, when large parts of the debate have turned to more embedded economic action, government intervention, and how to marshal market forces alongside other possible institutions and policies to further growth. Given the importance of information in the economy, a good sense of the wide variety of processes through which information is gathered and exchanged between business, government and other societal actors is paramount. This book offers, forty-plus years after its first edition, a still excellent reflection on the model of indicative planning that did just that."

Bob Hancké, LSE, UK

"Long time ago indicative planning was fashioned as exemplified by Saul Estrin and Peter Holmes with their analysis of French planning. Then planning vanished from the landscape of economic globalisation and fully-fledged market ideology for four decades or so. Now, in hectic times of de-globalisation, declining neo-liberalism, war threats and faster climate change, indicative planning is likely to come back for hedging against skyrocketing macroeconomic uncertainty. Drawing lessons from the French experience in the past will be invaluable. Therefore reading this book is urgently needed."

Wladimir Andreff, Honorary Professor, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, France

"I am not surprised that there is interest in re-publishing Holmes/Estrins Planning in Theory and Practice. I read the book when it was first published. At the time I was responsible for the OECD Economic Outlook, and the production of the Organizations economic forecasts, and I had lengthy discussions with the authors, when they were conducting their research, about the role of forecasts in influencing business behaviour. After spending 40+ years in the wilderness, the ideas the book raises have a rejuvenated significance today: industrial policy has come back into vogue, not least as a result of President Bidens activist so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which brought industrial policy to the forefront again in the US, but most recently widespread concerns, ranging from the US to Europe, have arisen in the context of the need for strategic thinking in industrial policy in the face of the challenge from China. In short, the whole matter of industrial policy is right back in vogue."

Dr John Llewellyn, Partner, Independent Economics. Formerly, Chef de Cabinet of the OECD Secretary General; and then Global Chief Economist at Lehman Brothers.

"Back in the 1960s and 1970s, indicative planning had a moment. In 1966 James Meade, Nobel Laureate and one of the greatest minds to combine economic theory and practice, wrote a (very good) book entitled The Theory of Indicative Planning. A quick perusal of JSTOR shows a plethora of related papers around this period. The attention paid then to indicative planning was well-deserved: it highlights a crucial shortcoming of the market mechanism and suggests a remedy.

The shortcoming it highlighted is of course the inability of the market as we know it to coordinate long-term investment decisions. We all know that the price mechanism is a coordinating device and that under some very stringent conditions it does a passable job. Most students can enumerate at least some of those conditions perfect competition, no external effects, no public goods, no asymmetric information etc. One that they rarely include, though it is absolutely crucial, is that there should be markets for goods and services well into the future. How far into the future? As far as the reach of current decisions. Absent these markets, there is nothing to coordinate long-term (i.e. investment) decisions. One of the great achievements of Arrow and Debreu was to clarify the need for these markets, or for some effective substitutes. Awareness of the need for these markets prompted a literature on the consequence of their absence. Both Leijonhufvud (Keynesian Economics and the Economics of Keynes) and Malinvaud (The Theory of Unemployment Reconsidered) argued that Keynesian phenomena are attributable in part to the failure of the market system to coordinate long-run decisions.

Indicative planning was introduced as a way of filling this void and aligning interdependent long-term decisions appropriately. The underlying idea was to provide a framework for discussing and iterating over long-horizon investment choices that affected each other investments in electric vehicles and charging stations, for example. Or in microprocessors and artificial intelligence. Governments would have a seat at the table and could inject social priorities such as reshoring or the need for reliable supply chains.

If this all sounds familiar, it is: we are rehashing the same issues today under the guise of industrial policy. Industrial policy is Indicative Planning 2.0, absent the word planning in honor of the rightward move policymaking since the 60s and 70s. Some mechanism for coordinating future-oriented choices is a necessary today as it was half a century ago.

The example par excellence of indicative planning was always French planning as practiced in the decades following World War 2. And this is where Saul Estrin and Peter Holmes come in: they are the worlds experts on what French planning achieved and how it achieved it. Their book is even more relevant today than it was when it first appeared."

Professor Geoff Heal, Columbia University, USA