ABSTRACT
Interwar economic planning, a global and transnational phenomenon that cut across ideological divides, encompassed various efforts: corporatist negotiation, coerced cartelization, extensive price-setting, aggressive fiscal and monetary policies, and nationalization. All commonly sought to ensure the coordination of industrial activities in a national economy based on the principle of Taylorist efficiency in order to manage economic crisis and sustain growth. The Soviet NEP in the 1920s was the earliest incarnation of such efforts, while elsewhere the ideas were already advanced in the early postwar years. After the Great Depression, Western countries began to institutionalize those ideas under the Soviet impact. The colonial world also found their future in the Soviet model. Ironically, Stalin’s Soviet Union became the first country that converted economic planning into a war mobilization tactic. Under another Soviet influence, the subordination of rational economic planning to political goals occurred across the globe in the mid- and late-1930s, including Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
