European Recovery Program
The official name of the Marshall Plan: the 1948 US statute and administered program financing Western European reconstruction from 1948 to 1952.
Economic Cooperation Administration: The US agency created in 1948 to administer European Recovery Program aid, headed by Paul Hoffman. The operating agency the statute created; every dollar of ERP aid flowed through it.
George C. Marshall: US Secretary of State whose June 1947 Harvard speech proposed the European recovery program. The speech that launched the program and gave it his name.
European Payments Union: The 1950 clearing arrangement, seeded by ERP funds, that restored multilateral trade settlements in Europe. The ERP's most direct institutional legacy for European trade.
West Germany: The Federal Republic of Germany, founded 1949, and the largest ERP recipient after Britain and France. ERP funds underwrote the currency reform and industrial revival behind the Wirtschaftswunder.
Alan Milward: The economic historian who argued Europe's recovery would have happened largely without the ERP. His revisionist account is the core of the debate over how much the ERP actually mattered.
Organisation for European Economic Co-operation: The European body, founded 1948, that allocated American aid among participating states and later became the OECD. The European counterpart that decided how ERP funds were divided among recipient countries.
Truman Doctrine: The 1947 policy committing the United States to aid countries resisting communism, beginning with Greece and Turkey. Set the political climate and congressional mood in which the ERP was passed.
Organization of the Black Sea...: The OECD, the Paris-based economic policy body that grew out of the OEEC in 1961. The ERP's coordinating body outlived the program and became the OECD.
United Kingdom: The European state, then still a great power, that received the largest single ERP allocation, about $3.2 billion. The largest recipient, and the test case for how conditions attached to grants worked.
Barry Eichengreen: The economist who quantified ERP effects, finding conditionality mattered more than the money itself. His growth-accounting work sharpened the measurement of the program's contribution.