ABSTRACT
In the first report of the Monnet Plan submitted to the Council of the Plan in November 1946 it was estimated that the total cost of reconstruction and new investment which the French economy could sustain between 1947 and 1950 was 2,250,000 million francs, equivalent to just over the estimated size of the national income in 1946. Of this, 49 per cent represented the repair of war damage, which the government was legally committed to finance in full. In addition investment in modernizing the recently nationalized coal and electricity industries was to account for a further 9 per cent of the total. The only year for which the planners attempted to itemize investment and the sources of finance was 1947. The itemization was based on a calculation of how investment had been financed in the first half of 1946. As Table 4.1 indicates more than 43 per cent of the actual total investment in 1946 had come from public funds, but the forecast for 1947 was that this proportion would fall to less than a third, in the expectation or hope that private savings would increase and be channelled into planned investment.
