Solidarity and Development: The OECD Technical Cooperation Committee in the Cold War

Abstract

Since the first “development decade,” the OECD has played a key role in coordinating aid from Western countries to the Global South. Before that first decade, however, wide gaps in development separated its own member countries. Within it, therefore, a Technical Cooperation Committee (TECO) operated to provide knowledge and expertise to “intermediate development” Mediterranean countries. TECO, through a network of experts, concentrated and disseminated data, ideas, and economic policy practices to promote the “modernization” of countries not fully integrated into the international economic system and ruled by dictatorial or otherwise undemocratic regimes. On the one hand, the program concretized intra-European solidarity to spread economic development and prosperity; on the other hand, it allowed a close look at the reality of those countries. Then, beginning in the 1970s, reflecting the change in the prevailing economic culture, TECO incubated the guiding lines for the global public administration reform. This study reconstructs the history of TECO through documentation preserved in the OECD archives in Paris.

Introduction

Scholars have explored in depth the technical assistance provided in the postwar period by international organizations, and in particular by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), in fostering the development of the countries of the Global South; less evident, and thus overshadowed in the literature, has been the activity carried out since the early days of the OECD toward backward European member countries (Clifton and Díaz-Fuentes 2011; Woodward 2009; Leimgruber and Schmelzer 2017; Mahon and McBride 2008; OECD 1978; Martens and Jakobi 2010; Schmelzer 2016; Jackson 2008).¹

By the mid-1950s, in fact, appreciable differences had emerged between OECD member countries as well; the very notion of a “southern” Europe, distinct from the affluent remainder of the continent represented by northern countries such as Germany and France, had its roots in the Cold War, when for geostrategic and military reasons, related to the creation of NATO's “Southern flank” (Hatzivassiliou and Triantaphyllou 2016; Chourchoulis 2015), the region shifted to the border between the West and the East (Judt 2005: 119). In short, if until the early 1950s the reasoning was based on countries defined as “developed” (European) and “underdeveloped” (“Overseas”), the situation changed with the realization of the existence of backward areas in Western Europe itself. A renewed definition of Southern Europe, first elaborated within major international organizations (Economic Commission for Europe 1954: 80; OEEC 1952: 169), then included Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. In short, “the problem of underdevelopment . . . was also very much a European problem” (Alacevich 2018: 223; Granata 2019), because in certain areas of these countries, mostly ruled, moreover, by dictatorial, autocratic, or in any case undemocratic regimes (Arrighi 1985; Payne 1986; Baumeister and Sala 2015; Fuà 1980; Sapelli 1996), “the general standard of living . . . was more characteristic of contemporary Africa than continental Europe” (Judt 2005: 511).

By the mid-1950s, therefore, the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), as the body charged with harmonizing economic and social policies among European countries under the auspices of the United States (Patel 2020: 37), had begun to address the problems of countries affected by the presence of backward areas, and with the formation of the OECD all activities were transferred to the latter (Griffiths 1997; Alacevich and Granata 2019).

This article reconstructs the history of the entity created to manage the assistance program for Southern European countries, the Technical Cooperation Committee (TECO), which has so far attracted only marginal scholarly attention. Those who have outlined its activities, moreover, have downplayed both the role of the committee—calling it a kind of “pariah” within the OECD—and the reasons behind it: “The view was ‘better colonels than communists’”—summarized Pal (2012: 35)—“and TECO was in part designed to channel expertise to [the southern] countries while the rest of the OECD turned a blind eye.”

This view, while multifaceted, was probably affected by the approach aimed at reconstructing the antecedents of activities supporting comprehensive public administration reform in the last decade of the last century. From that perspective, the entire earlier history of TECO, which itself had played a role in incubating the activities supporting reform, ended up being summarized as a mere antecedent of “public management” (Pal 2012: 43; Sahlin-Andersson 2000).

This study aims to reconstruct the forgotten history of TECO, and first and foremost it contributes to complicating the image of the OECD as a club of Western industrialized countries as opposed to the so-called Global South, that is, the less developed countries. Research shows that the organization and the economists associated with it shared the idea of an underdeveloped South first and foremost in relation to the European South, thus within the conceptual and geographic boundaries of the OECD perimeter. The “Club of the Rich” (Camps 1975; Gilpin 2000), in other words, was segmented internally, and the “South” was actually well represented within the group of OECD countries. Leimgruber and Schmelzer (2017: 1) write that “it was within and through the OECD that Western capitalist countries discussed their economic policies both in the Cold War setting and vis-à-vis the emerging power-bloc of decolonizing countries in the Global South.” This shareable point of view needs to be supplemented so as not to overlook that the OECD addressed the problem of poverty within its own institutional boundaries, not as a marginal problem but as an issue that characterized large regions and entire countries. This had important consequences in terms of economic discourse and policy measures because, in addition to being concerned with promoting growth in advanced economies, since the 1950s the OECD had been interested in the problem of how to develop backward regions in Europe.

In relation to the broader discourse on development at the global level, then, and adding the European perspective mentioned above, this analysis offers insights into one of the forgotten roots in the history of development economics, namely, that of Europe.

Moreover, although the analysis necessarily focuses on the activities of TECO, precisely because they have hitherto been neglected, it indirectly recalls the importance of the “systematic analysis of the activities and influence of professional economists in the modern (i.e., post-1945) world” (Coats 1986: vii). Although the role of theories or visions for shaping TECO's strategies is not explicitly explored here, it is believed that from the systematization of the projects we can better understand and recognize the theories and practices that marked the age of “high development theory” (Krugman 1993: 16). The projects reconstructed here were formulated and put into practice mostly by economists from think tanks or national bureaucracies who worked in OECD headquarters as representatives of their national governments or who were seconded to the organization and acted as international officials. In such roles they traveled as experts to other countries and developed multilateral ties, bilateral ties, and ties among the community of economic experts in different countries and in international organizations; this process helped to generate and disseminate a common body of economic knowledge and experimentation that, in the case of the OECD, also highlights the coexistence of different approaches to the issue of development.

Finally, while TECO's contribution to public administration reform certainly appears interesting, its thirty-year role in managing a network of “technical” relations between more advanced countries and OECD Mediterranean countries appears more relevant. TECO, with its activities reconstructed through unpublished documents preserved in its Paris archives, ultimately appears to have contributed to keeping active a weaving of relations centered on aspects relevant to the economic governance of the countries of the European semiperiphery, which at the fall of dictatorships helped to make them “enter or re-enter the ‘West’ with such little difficulty” (Judt 2005: 649).

Origins of Intra-European Technical Assistance

In the late 1940s, Truman's enunciation of “Point Four” initiated the “development age” (Rist 1997: 74; Casari 1963), and the US-led international approach linked “humanitarianism, the concept of development, and the Cold War” (Lorenzini 2017: 48) to make the benefits of progress available to countries in backward areas. The scale of this task of supporting the end of reconstruction, first, and promoting development, later, required that existing institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) be joined by other supranational institutions, and in particular the UN and its sectoral and territorial agencies such as FAO, UNESCO, the ILO, and the WHO.

Later, the Kennedy administration would give further impetus to these directions, with the activation, alongside the UN agencies, of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and, indeed, with the creation within the OECD of the Development Assistance Group (Lorenzini 2017: 35; Kaufman 1982). The last was succeeded in the early 1960s by the Development Assistance Committee, tasked with matching the growing expectations of developing countries and coordinating member countries, many of which were busy dealing with the legacies of the colonial past. The philosophy driving these directions descended from Truman's fourth point filtered through the experience of the 1950s; underdeveloped countries had a technical and technological level inferior to the innovations made available by the progress of science, and they were plagued by a shortage of modern skills underlying the low productivity and inadequate living standards that marked them: “Economic development can take place if natural resources are poor”—admonished Angus Maddison (1963: 20), who headed the OECD in such areas of activity—“but it will not take place if people remain ignorant.”

According to the current view, the promotion of increases in knowledge and skills was thus in the interest of both backward countries and advanced countries willing to provide aid, which had to include, in addition to the necessary resources, the planning of education systems according to the development goals to be achieved. Nevertheless, if the increase was to be rapid, it was necessary to massively mobilize skills from abroad and break the constraints imposed by the low starting position, precisely through the “extensive use of foreign skills and training” aimed at reducing the technological gap and through the dissemination of technical and managerial skills, all to promote economic growth. “Technical assistance” was to be in short “a bottleneck-breaker, enabling the application of substantial amounts of other human and material resources . . . unused because of the lack of the strategic skills component” (Maddison, Stavrianopoulos, and Higgins 1966: 11).

Behind these explicit intentions, there were obviously also nonneutral reasons that, through assistance policies and interventions, also conveyed values and ideologies marked by “American power,” “modernization theory,” and Cold War interests (Elfert 2019; Tipps 1973; Westad 2003; Haefele 2003; Engerman 2004; McMahon 2013; Martín García and Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla 2020). In this regard, it has been pointed out that “aid warfare” was an aspect of the “strange kind of cold war” (Lorenzini 2017: 11), and an “international assistance industry” has been spoken of as a “structural element of the new bipolar order” (Villani 2007: 1), all the more so as the process of decolonization began, when the geography and methodologies of aid were increasingly determined by the need to consolidate opposing blocs.

In any case, the Development Assistance Committee, launching its activities in the early 1960s, estimated that in developing countries under technical assistance programs of various kinds, more than one hundred thousand international “experts” were operating, including forty thousand teachers, and that within a framework of rapidly growing resources, estimated at around $550 million, OECD countries were funding three-quarters of UN aid programs (Maddison 1963: 23).

In the area of technical assistance, since 1953 the OEEC had operated through the European Productivity Agency (EPA), created under US pressure as the “operational arm” of the organization to disseminate practices aimed at raising the “productivity” of member countries (Boel 2003: 133).² From the middle of the decade, the “Europeanization” of the EPA's activities was beginning based on the observation that the “poorer” countries, such as Turkey, Greece, and Southern Italy itself, had been rarely involved in the activities, sharing among them the preliminary need to promote economic development rather than to increase productivity.³ From 1955 to 1956, consequently, the initiatives were refocused on projects designed to adhere to the conditions of these realities and, among other things, to consolidate the eastern border through political and social stabilization and thus to bring about the modernization of the peripheral countries (Boel 2003: 199; Alacevich 2018).

Italy, because of its internal division, became the hinge between the more advanced countries, whose level of development it shared, and the backward ones, with whom it shared the existence of areas of underdevelopment. The start of activities within the OEEC coincided with the formulation of the so-called Vanoni Plan. The issue had been maturing since January 1955, when the Italian government had shared in the OEEC the Ten-Year Scheme for Employment and Income Development (Schema decennale per lo sviluppo dell'occupazione e del reddito), the Vanoni Plan.⁴ The ten-year plan, founded on growth forecasts of 5 percent per year and on international cooperation that would allow for working toward a balance of payments, aimed at creating four million jobs and reducing the gap between the country's north and the south (Granata 2022c; Alacevich and Granata 2019). The support for the project, in particular for the countries of Southern Europe, was confirmed by Harold Stassen, US representative to the OEEC. He reminded all of the need for security and peace, confirming the interest in the Italian initiative and its extension to countries with similar problems. The Italian development plan, consequently, became the point of reference for a more general discussion about the conditions of Southern European countries, which, due to their “underdevelopment,” could constitute a “major problem in the Free World.”⁵

This project, moreover, consolidated the collaboration between the OEEC and the Svimez Agency, which, already an adviser to the Italian government, had materially drafted the Vanoni Plan under the supervision of the Cambridge economist Austin Robinson and was confirmed as one of the organization's major partners in development matters. Svimez, in fact, was specialized in the study of economic and social backwardness in the Italian South, and in particular on ways to help the modernization of southern agriculture and the development of a new industrial sector and infrastructures (its full name is the Association for the Development of Industry in Southern Italy—Associazione per lo Sviluppo dell'Industria nel Mezzogiorno) (Negri Zamagni and Sanfilippo 1988). The association's council included personalities of international importance, such as Jan Tinbergen, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, and, testifying to the close ties maintained with the organization, Ambassador Attilio Cattani, who in Paris had led the Italian delegation during the crucial phase of reconstruction; the council also included, from the beginning of 1955, having divested himself of the role of secretary general of the OEEC, Robert Marjolin, himself former director of the French Ministry of National Economy and then vice president of the EEC Commission and professor of economics in Paris (Farese 2017: 70; Novacco 2007).

Building on this experience, Italy became the bearer of the opportunity to promote a project aimed at the backward regions within the European continent. The project, later named “Aep No. 400,” or Project 400, in addition to Italy itself (which later exited in 1963), involved Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia (beginning in 1957), Portugal, and Spain (beginning in 1960), with the aim of providing technical assistance for development (Boel 2003: 201–2).⁶

The methods indicated for achieving these goals consisted of sending experts, exchanging experiences in international seminars and conferences, sharing data and information, and, finally, using training; special importance was placed from the outset on experimenting with “pilot areas” where economic and social investments could be combined (Granata 2021).

The initial area of activity involved assistance with economic planning and related services, reflecting an original interest in public administration as a lever for such policies. The first operational mission of Project 400, in fact, led Dutheillet de Lamothe, French state councilor, and Giorgio Ceriani Sebregondi and Massimo Annesi, of Italy's Svimez, to Greece, with the aim of advising the government of that country on how to reorganize institutions for the purpose of developing long-term programs (Novacco 1995: 109–10; Farese 2017: 78).⁷

The “most original part” of Project 400 involved the experimentation of “pilot” or “trial and demonstration areas.”⁸ These interventions were based on the conviction that, first, the development of backward areas could not be achieved solely through financial investments but depended equally on “human investments,” that is, on a generalized increase in education, training, and skills; second, the areas identified required a comprehensive approach involving firms, communities, and institutions; and finally, it was assumed that “development [could not] be imposed from without” but had to be produced by the populations concerned, supported by actions aimed at “mobilizing the latent energies of the local populations.”⁹ In this regard, the program operated in three areas: Sardinia (1957), the Greek region of Epirus (1958), and Turkey, in the province of Mugla (1959) (Granata 2021).

In conclusion, when in the transition between the OECE and the OECD the EPA prepared a summary of the activities it carried out, it described them as “negligible in comparison with the immensity of the need, but quite substantial in comparison with the total resources of the Agency,” since the share of the OECD's budget going to the EPA had grown from 12 percent to 20 percent.¹⁰

The transition process, however, was taking place in anything but a linear way, as reflected by tensions among member countries in the EPA. In June 1960, at the time of issuing the last annual program, faced with the decision of the Council of Ministers to decrease the endowment by more than 25 percent, the board issued a resolution in which disappointment was expressed so blatantly as to be almost unheard of in the organization's records. In it, it recommended that the 1960–61 program should not be regarded as a precedent for the future, and it “greatly regrets” decisions made against unanimous calls for increased contributions to countries with underdeveloped areas; moreover, the EPA executive declared that “such complacency [was] inexcusable in the face of the economic expansion of the Eastern bloc,” with the emphasis on the urgency for Western governments to provide the resources necessary for the continuation of the agency's own activities, “or its successor Organization.”¹¹

The Founding of TECO

In the transition phase, the organization launched the Technical Assistance Program, which inherited Project 400 pending institutional developments.¹² In the meantime, the committee formed by ministers to design the new organization (the one that would become the OECD) recommended the establishment of a Technical Assistance Committee, which was soon renamed, however, as the Technical Cooperation Committee. Since it was charged with “drawing up and supervising the program . . . for the benefit of the member countries,” in fact, the concept of cooperation was preferred to that of assistance, to avoid paternalistic and hierarchical overtones and to mark a difference with activities in the Third World (Domergue 1968: 13; Pal 2012: 35).¹³

The occasion, moreover, was functional to reframe the analysis of the countries involved both in terms of technical assistance, where OECD activity was concentrated in crucial areas and contributed to multilateral coordination of other activities,¹⁴ and in terms of development. Regardless of the differences, in fact, these countries were certainly still united by being “unquestionably less developed” than other members¹⁵ and by “still lag[ging] considerably behind” the European average.¹⁶

For them, within the organization and in the activities of the OECD, the category of the “intermediate stage of development” had been adopted, formed by parameters that described a gross national product per inhabitant of less than $700, an agricultural sector that comprised more than 35 percent of the working population, a high rate of emigration, a trade balance in deficit, and, finally, a per capita electricity consumption of less than 800 kW/h per year.¹⁷ In addition to the usual economic indicators, however, the OECD also employed additional ones that, although “imperfect” and “rough” (OECD 1968: 13–14), were considered valid for defining certain qualitative aspects of the lives of Mediterranean populations; for example, while in France and the United States meat consumption exceeded 80 kg per capita, in the “TECO countries”—as they began to be called—it ranged between Portugal's 20 kg and Yugoslavia's 40 kg; during the same period, the number of telephones per thousand inhabitants ranged between 12 in Turkey and 87 in Spain, compared with 124 in France and 148 in Germany; and the number of radios ranged from 53 in Turkey to 100 in Greece, Portugal, and Yugoslavia, that is, a quarter of the OECD average (OECD 1968: 20). Lest there be any misunderstandings about the concept of “modernity” and the misunderstandings that such a notion entailed, in Southern European hospitals by the middle of the decade there were three beds per thousand inhabitants, compared with nearly nine for the OECD average; and the infant mortality rate in the 1950s, “more than double the rates typical of Western Europe” (Economic Commission for Europe 1954: 80), remained in similar proportions.¹⁸

TECO launched its activities in 1962,¹⁹ and in its first documents defined its position within the organization and, most importantly, developed criteria for selecting projects to be included in the annual program to be submitted to the Council of Ministers.²⁰ The criteria took on the experience of the previous decade and aimed to inspire programs focused on a limited number of priority and long-term projects; they indicated the need to promote permanent institutions that would continue activities independently so as to amplify the effects of the projects;²¹ and rather than purely technical aspects, they emphasized structural issues hindering the progress of countries.²²

Consequently, during the first five-year period, the criterion of promoting relevant and “long-term” projects produced a reduction in interventions from ninety-seven, in 1963, to forty-two, in 1968.²³ Projects in the area of development planning and related activities absorbed 34 percent of the budget; support to industrial development, 18 percent; to the agricultural sector, 24 percent; to the education, training, and scientific research sector, 11 percent; the remaining resources were concentrated on joint activities in the areas of manpower, public administration, and tourism.²⁴

National Development and Planning: The Top-Down Approach

The first area of activity was certainly support for the elaboration of development plans, which at that time constituted the main instrument for governing national economic policies. In this regard, the organization had nurtured a network of relationships and experts that allowed it, on the one hand, to amplify at the international level national experiments, and, on the other hand, to intervene in a top-level and intimate area in the elaboration of the economic policies of member countries, as well as, in relation to aid, to place itself in a strategic position to coordinate, or at least ascertain, the actual flows of resources destined for countries.

Expertise in this area, pioneered in Italy, had later been consolidated in Greece, where in the 1950s, albeit with severe limitations on the social and political level, policies of integration and development urged internationally had been initiated (Freris 1986: 125–26; Ioakimidis 1984: 37). The first mission of Project 400 had taken place here,²⁵ and in 1959 the organization mediated a new relationship between Svimez and the Greek government, which was interested in engaging an expert “at the highest level” to coordinate the drafting of a “five-year development plan for the Greek economy, similar to the Italian development scheme” (Granata 2019: 19). As a result, during the following year Pasquale Saraceno and Giulio Fossi, a Svimez collaborator assigned to stay on site, coordinated a group of experts engaged in drafting a massive investment plan that would go along with “the need for a radical transformation of the country's structure.”²⁶ Finally, the Program of Economic Development of Greece was presented in April 1960 by Prime Minister K. Karamalis, who, calling it of “decisive importance for the future of the Greek people,” explicitly thanked Saraceno and Svimez for their efforts in its preparation.²⁷

A further example of intervention was the OECD's involvement in Turkey, an intervention that naturally exceeded technical assistance alone, although the latter was an essential component. In the 1960s, as the flow of aid to developing areas increased, experimental consortial forms were established to operate in the field, replicating the experiments conducted shortly before by the World Bank in India and Pakistan (Hackett 1969: 20).

Although aggregated with Western European countries, Turkey was in fact a developing country with low income, high debt, and a structural imbalance on its external accounts; after benefiting from the Marshall Plan and both bilateral and multilateral programs, it had gone through a stabilization process in 1958 by receiving substantial credits from European countries, the United States, the IMF, and the European Payments Union (Hackett 1969: 20; Milor 1990; Ünay 2006). Thereafter, the military government installed in May 1960 (Bozarslan 2006: 65) set the goal of economic and financial stability of the country and the initiation of planned development. To this end, it established a planning bureau charged with preparing the first development plan with the help of foreign experts led by Jan Tinbergen, sent by the OECD (Stettner 1965: 3). Tinbergen, one of the towering figures in development as well within the OECD, had already worked in many countries in Asia, South America, and Africa, but—as Dekker (2021: 309) showed—“he was nowhere involved for as long as in Turkey.” Indeed, having arrived in the country in the spring of 1960, he worked for six years—with Joop Koopman as “his man on the ground”—to establish a “planning agency” and spread a culture of national, sectoral, and regional planning.

Accordingly, in July 1962 the organization established, first, a working group on Turkey's development problems and, shortly thereafter, the Consortium for Turkey,²⁸ in order to coordinate the complex flow of both bilateral and multilateral aid—which by the end of the decade reached $100 million annually, in addition to credits from the IMF and the European Fund—and finalize it to the goals of the Five-Year Plan (Dekker 2021: 329). The consortium and TECO, therefore, constituted the coordinating point for activities designed to assist Turkey, and already after the first two years of operation, despite the difficulties that arose, it was felt that the provision of assistance within a multilateral framework had not only given an important boost to the country's efforts but had also constituted a new approach in “the new art of ‘aid diplomacy’” (Hackett 1969: 22). Turkey, through this coordinated multilateral effort, had become an “international development project” (Dekker 2021: 331).

Still, in the late 1970s, the consortium continued its activities and restructured the debt of Turkey, which, despite one of the highest growth rates in the OECD (about 7 percent per year), had remained the least developed country in the area and which, despite infrastructural and industrial improvements, partly as a result of the oil crisis remained vulnerable and with a persistent deficit bridged through foreign aid channeled through the consortium (Kuehn 1978).

In addition to Greece and Turkey, Spain also received OECD support for planning (OECD 1968),²⁹ as did Salazar's Portugal. Indeed, in 1963, that country's government also defined an economic development strategy based on administrative and structural reforms as well as long-term planning.³⁰ Up to that time, a first public investment plan had been implemented, for the period 1953–58, and then a second with the objectives of accelerating the rate of growth and industrialization and raising living standards and employment. These goals, however, had also failed because of “some uncertainties arising from important factors external to the national economy,” and the government had decided to interpose between the second and third plan, scheduled for 1968–73, a two-year interim plan (1965–67). Within this framework was the activity of TECO, which worked to organize planning offices, train staff in the bodies involved, and assist in the preparation of the interim plan and, later, in the preparation of the third development plan.³¹ The international expert group was led by Robin Marris, of Cambridge, involved scholars and officials active at the government level and in the central banks of France, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, and prepared the planning schemes and the forecasts that supported them. In addition, the group outlined repeated recommendations, “broadly followed” by the Portuguese authorities, aimed at better institutional functioning at every level.³² Finally, the work of the international experts had been highly appreciated by the Portuguese authorities, who had prolonged and then stabilized the collaboration even if only to “check and confirm work already done,”³³ fueling an exchange of expertise with foreign countries that in subsequent years involved staff from the highest programming institutions in courses and missions aimed at learning about the practices of the experts’ home countries.

Territory and Community: The Bottom-Up Approach

The fact that the OEEC-OECD's initial interest in development was sparked by the problems of areas within member countries informed its two-pronged approach. While, on the one hand, it conformed to the planning policies in vogue at the time (Judt 2005: 87), on the other hand, expertise had coagulated around the organization and was more influenced by initiatives in the field of “community development,”³⁴ that is, interventions to stimulate latent energies in local populations through knowledge transfer, skills, and even through self-help methods, aimed at raising living standards without necessarily committing the state to large investments.

The experience, in the end, had affirmed the need for simultaneity between economic investment and investment in human capital: “Too often,” it was stated, “in many parts of the world, capital investments have been undertaken without adequate preparation of the necessary trained elements to run and make effective use of these investments.”³⁵

The approach, pioneered in pilot projects in Epirus and Sardinia, also filtered into subsequent initiatives and development planning activities, but at the regional level (Isard and Cumberland 1961).

A pivotal moment for the comparison of different experiences, theories, and methodologies in this new field of activity was the “first study conference on problems of economic development” organized by the EPA-OEEC in Bellagio, on Lake Como; the conference, held in the summer of 1960, explored the problems of “regional economic planning” for ten days. Here, the delegations from the TECO countries represented the national study cases, and experts gravitating around the EPA delved into cross-cutting topics supporting the ongoing processes. Among them, the Italian delegation presented all the experiences conducted since the first regional planning experiment began in 1953, with the “Sardinian rehabilitation plan,” managed by Svimez. Later, given that no “universally acceptable” regional planning method existed, this first project was used as a guide “on a number of occasions and [was] increasingly applied in the theory and practice of regional planning” in Italy and abroad (Isard and Cumberland 1961: 54).

The visions that coexisted within the agency represented to some extent the different approaches to development that confronted each other at the time. At Bellagio, for example, Rosenstein-Rodan presented the most widely accepted approach within the Italian agency, summed up in the theory of the “Big Push” (Arndt 1989; Alacevich 2021). In this meeting, the scholar, as an affiliate of “SVIMEZ and MIT,” explained that the solution for industrialization lay in public intervention to create “industrial zones.” The industrial zones could catalyze investments, avoid the nonoptimal location risks, and realize economies of scale in construction of infrastructures or public utility services (Isard and Cumberland 1961: 205). Furthermore, to start up the “transmission belt” that allowed the “dynamo” of public intervention to match the local economy, a comprehensive system of substitute measures for industry protection was needed—direct and indirect incentives to foster efficiency and technological innovation, easier access to credit, tax concessions on new investments, and so forth.

On the other hand, within the Italian agency also matured a development culture less enthusiastic about the technical-economic dimension of planning, represented, above all, by Giorgio Ceriani Sebregondi, who, no less active in the OEEC and internationally, had headed in the agency since 1953 the “sociological section” (Farese 2017: 71; Ceriani Sebregondi 1950). This approach aimed at a more global progress: development could not be induced from the outside, and while financial investment and technical assistance were necessary elements, equally indispensable were interventions aimed at mobilizing cultural, social, legal, institutional, and technological factors to achieve a “qualitative expansion of society” (Farese 2017: XIV). A social dimension of development, in other words, could be fostered by the removal of obstacles and bottlenecks, but it had to arise as a “self-propulsive” phenomenon and tend toward a “harmonious” evolution of communities (XV): “Development,” Ceriani Sebregondi wrote, “is first and foremost the development of people's capacities” (Farese 2017: 79). Regarding the EPA-OEEC technical aid projects, Svimez experts were also called upon for consultancy and training work in Turkey, Egypt, Spain, and Morocco, and this more social approach was also being tried out in the context of assistance projects, for example, in the Belucistan and Sistan regions of Iran.

The experimentation conducted in that pioneering phase highlighted that, although in the original logic of the OEEC philosophy the two approaches across disciplines, particularly economics and sociology, were integrable and complementary, they also contained contradictory and tendentially divisive aspects. Emblematically, within Svimez, they finally caused a split between those who, on the one hand, maintained an enduring faith in development plans and those who, on the other hand, focused more on “micro facts than macro facts,” moving “from strictly economic facts to the facts of society” (Novacco 1995: 71).

One testing ground for the mix of visions mentioned was the activity conducted in Yugoslavia, whose participation in the activities of the organization was an apparent anomaly resulting from the “unique relationship between a socialist country and the OECD” (Marković and Obadić 2017) initiated since 1955.³⁶ The mutual interest was evident: on the OECD side, Yugoslavia's involvement strengthened its ties with the West, distancing it from the Soviet bloc, and allowed direct knowledge of the country's economy (Marković and Obadić 2017: 91; Milenkovitch 1971; Rusinow 1977); on the Yugoslav side, the relationship helped to lessen isolation, and because it centered precisely on scientific-technical cooperation and economic policies, it was “particularly advantageous” over time (Marković and Obadić 2017: 101: Lees 1997).

Partly as a result of the economic blockade by Eastern European countries, the Yugoslav economy had stagnated until 1953, when the country turned to the West, reactivating a 9 percent annual growth rate that increased in the 1960s (OECD 1965: 27). However, there were wide regional gaps in the country and territories where living standards were well below the national average, especially in the southern regions of Montenegro and Kosovo-Metohija (Kosmet).³⁷ The need, therefore, was to try to reduce internal gaps and differences with Western Europe, and the OECD observed with interest the process of reforming the Yugoslav economic system, deeming it a “unique experiment” to produce a “socialist market economy” (Bockman 2011: 77).³⁸

Bockman showed how during the 1950s, especially toward the end of the decade, “exchanges” between Western countries and some countries beyond the Iron Curtain were being initiated between students and scholars in economic subjects (Bockman 2011: 63). The “new East-West interactions” formed a “transnational scholarly community” (74) that dialogued and shared a common culture and similar professional tools despite apparent radical theoretical differences exacerbated by the Cold War. Observation of the experience of the OECD and Yugoslavia, the “earliest and most open to this dialogue” (75), allows us to extend this reconstruction and to observe that such exchange—and thus such Western influence in cultural terms—concerned economists in their role not only as intellectuals but also as experts and advisers to the government; and that therefore through the activities of the organization the exchange concerned not only economic theories but also the policies and practices that flowed from them, at least in the area of development planning.

TECO's program envisioned, on the one hand, consolidating agriculture, industry, and exports and, on the other hand, setting up a regional project that recalled previous experiences and made OECD the first, and only, provider of technical assistance to the Kosovo region.³⁹ The area was among the poorest in Europe, with a per capita income less than half the national average, much of the territory mountainous, and plains cultivated with primitive methods aimed at mere subsistence, while livestock farming was underdeveloped. The population, consisting mainly of Muslim Albanians, also lived isolated due to ethnic differences and infrastructural deficiencies.⁴⁰ To develop the region's economy, the Second Five-Year Plan of 1957 had designated Kosmet as an underdeveloped area, allocated 230 billion dinars ($300 million) in federal funds, and devised a regional plan for the 1960s.⁴¹ Since implementation of the plan included funds to disseminate technical expertise to support investment, the government in 1961 had turned to TECO, which, by specific request, had hired an Italian firm to conduct a field study, review plans, and prepare a program of assistance.⁴² The multiyear program, with expert missions and training to businesses and workers, was to help implement the regional plan and reactivate the dormant energies of the Kosovar community.⁴³

After a five-year period of operation, the program was subjected to an evaluation process that pointed out that it had “made a net positive contribution to the development of the Region . . . [had] helped certain sectors of the kosmet economy to develop at a faster rate, [had] solved certain problems of technology or pratice, [had] rectified some mistakes and shown how others [could] be avoided. This conclusion, however, [had] never been very seriously in doubt.”⁴⁴

Of an opposite sign was the outcome of the intervention conducted in Portugal, which was, moreover, much smaller in scale and experimental in nature and had operated for a two-year period, in parallel with planning assistance, under the guidance of the British consultant Geoffrey Nunn, an expert in community development and regional development techniques. The project, however, had not produced “any tangible results,” and the OECD had suspended it, possibly referring it to subsequent regional planning activities.⁴⁵

More fruitful, in contrast, was the institutional promotion project launched in 1962 in Spain, and in particular in the Ebro basin, one of the country's largest regions, which, spread over thirteen provinces, constituted 16 percent of the national territory and one-fifth of the arable land (OECD 1971: 17).⁴⁶

The connection between education and development, which is a truism today, was less obvious in the early decades of the postwar era, when the focus was almost exclusively on (the lack of) physical and financial capital. The specific nature and characteristics of human capital captured the attention of scholars and practitioners only insofar as the problem of “educating” an agrarian population to the discipline of factory work and to new technologies in agriculture was concerned. The “pioneers” of development economics, for example, Paul Rosenstein-Rodan and Albert Hirschman, discussed among themselves the question of training a formerly agrarian population to new productive processes within the framework of a growth strategy (Rosenstein-Rodan 1943; Hirschman 1958). A systematic analysis of the role of human capital, however, was in those years virtually absent. This began to change between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, with the birth and quick development of the new disciplinary subfield of the “economics of education” and the wave of studies on human capital.

Economists such as Theodore Schultz and others thus started to focus on what are called intangible factors of production, such as education, on-the-job training, and, in the advanced economies, research and development. Especially in the case of less developed economies, scholars highlighted the importance of the changing quality of factors of production—and specifically of workers’ skills—to explain economic growth. Criticizing the lack of investment in human capital given by national governments and multilateral organizations such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, Schultz advanced a completely new perspective. Only investment in education and vocational training, he claimed, would make it possible for poor populations to exploit the benefits of technological advancements: “It simply is not possible to have the fruits of a modern agriculture and the abundance of modern industry without making large investments in human beings” (Schultz 1961: 16).

In this perspective, the OEEC-OECD commitment to educational issues offered an important contribution to the then nascent subfield of the economics of education (Granata 2022a, 2022b). Although other organizations, such as UNESCO and the ILO, had already emphasized education as a fundamental human right and a key tool for the promotion of full citizenship and social development worldwide, the organization approached the issue differently, because of its mission to promote development. Among the important initiatives set up in this regard, the main one was certainly the Mediterranean Regional Project launched in 1960 and continued throughout the decade. The operational project involved all TECO countries and constituted a “pioneering” project based on studies and technical assistance, in which working groups established by the governments of these countries worked in coordination also in order to promote institutions capable of disseminating skills and knowledge necessary to modernize production, starting with agricultural production (OECD 1964, 1966; Alacevich and Granata 2019).

Within this framework was the specific intervention developed by TECO in Spain. The Spanish authorities, as early as 1960, had forwarded a request to the OECD for assistance aimed at improving the agricultural sector, which had provoked missions of international experts and produced hypotheses for action (OECD 1971: 37). On this basis, in 1962 the Spanish authorities decided to intervene in the area, chosen for its unrealized resource potential and as a “pilot” project to be eventually replicated in other Mediterranean countries; under the aegis of TECO, therefore, the director of the Ecole nationale superieure d'horticulture in Versailles and the director of the Institut fur gartnerische betriebslehre und marktforshung der technischen hochschule in Hanover formed the group of experts in charge of designing courses and the institutional architecture of the intervention through preparatory missions and exchanges that led the Spanish experts to France, Italy, and Germany to learn about the agricultural institutions and policies already existing in European countries.

The Center for Agricultural Research and Development of the Ebro Region was created by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture following an agreement with the OECD for an assistance program placed within the framework of the first National Four-Year Plan for Economic and Social Development (1964–67), which in fact pointed to the agricultural sector and the increase in domestic consumption as levers for the country's development and assigned a significant role precisely to the Ebro basin (OECD 1971: 31, 99–103).

The center, in short, became the vehicle for the entire program of assistance in terms of study, research, training, and counseling, including at the institutional level, aimed at identifying ways to rationalize and modernize all branches of the agricultural sector; in addition, it provided specialized courses that awarded a legally recognized diploma; and finally, to foster the dissemination of the skills developed, an information service operated in it in cooperation with regional authorities.

After a five-year period of operation, the Ebro project constituted “one of the most important initiatives among the forty or so projects managed” by TECO, absorbed nearly 10 percent of the funds and two-thirds of the Spanish program, with 40 percent national cofinancing, and was considered a model with a “positive impact on raising agricultural productivity and the orientation of production in the Region.” According to TECO evaluators, moreover, “there was no doubt that the Spanish authorities consider[ed] the Ebro development center as being an important element in their overall effort to modernise agriculture” (OECD 1971: 74–75).

A special effort in the area of regional planning was also, and perhaps especially, made by TECO in Turkey. Here, in parallel with national planning activities, regional planning assistance had been initiated as early as the late 1950s with the establishment of a department, composed of international experts based in Ankara and Istanbul and under the coordination of a chief consultant from the Joint Center for Urban Studies at MIT and Harvard University.⁴⁷

Later, under the aegis of TECO, schemes for the development of East Marmara were prepared, schemes that were then the basis of repeated missions on the ground; and similar activities were taking place in Zonguldak province, Cukurova district, the Aegean region, and Eastern Anatolia.⁴⁸ This activity over time made TECO's permanent mission a kind of éminence grise; and the department over the course of a decade increased both its budget and residential staff tenfold, which by the 1970s amounted to over 130 units.⁴⁹ During the decade, TECO's growth had been “impressive” (Dekker 2021: 314).

TECO's action in Turkey, however, was also characterized by further intervention in Ankara, which, starting with a training program with seventy-one students in 1956, resulted in the founding of the Middle East Technical University, with five thousand students enrolled in 1967 and double that number in 1972. The university was designed to solve the problem of the lack of technicians in the Middle East region, and it differed from other Turkish universities in that its language of instruction was English; the project absorbed 7 percent of all technical assistance provided to Turkey and hosted about eighty foreign faculty members annually. In the course of its development, the UN had helped found the departments of engineering and architecture, while the OECD had supported the departments of economics and statistics, and by 1964 had created, in fact, the Department of Regional Planning to support the training of local staff on these issues.⁵⁰

Financing and Evaluating Activities

In addition to the larger projects, TECO over the years promoted courses, sponsored overseas training trips and the travel of officials of all levels,⁵¹ supported missions of “consultants,” “experts,” and “consulting firms,”⁵² drafted and disseminated reports, and made recommendations and created and maintained databases to support reforms in the countries involved.⁵³

In terms of resources, the program enjoyed a budget of around 10 million francs annually throughout the 1960s, in addition to contributions from some private entities, such as the Ford Foundation, whose funding to TECO reached a peak in 1963 of more than 500,000 francs.⁵⁴ All programs, moreover, were jointly financed by the recipient countries, with contributions rising over the decade from an average of 10 percent to 30 percent.⁵⁵

Obviously, project evaluation did not end with quantifying the resources deployed, and the need for evaluating interventions in terms of costs, benefits, and qualitative measurements had grown over time in the organization, however “highly tentative and experimental” any approach in this regard.⁵⁶ Indeed, in this field, there had been a “lack of any pre-established frame of reference” for evaluating assistance interventions with recognized standards from the outset.

In the postwar period, what Porter (1995: 3) called the “cultures of objectivity” were finding new ground for reflection and application in the development of attempts and methods of appraisal of development projects. The emergence of appraisal techniques was characteristic of the multilateral organizations, such as the OECD, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization, and the World Bank (Kornai 1979).

In this regard, Alacevich (2014: 159), through the history of a “failed collaboration” between the World Bank and Albert Hirschman, averred that “the discussion on project evaluation that took place in the 1960s is important for the broader history of development theory and institutions” (139). Indeed, the confrontation between a quantitative and a qualitative view in the approach to activity evaluation was the essential node, while during the 1960s a new wave of studies in cost-benefit analysis appeared, fueled precisely by the experiences of international organizations (Isard and Cumberland 1961: 366). In this regard, within the OECD, the need emerged for “a method for the appraisal of investment projects which more appropriately takes account of the specific circumstances in underdeveloped countries than benefit-cost analysis as applied in a developed country like the United States does” (372). These approaches, while controversial and in their infancy, moreover, were normally applied to investment projects in areas such as electric power, roads, irrigation, and railways. The application of these methodologies evidently showed that it was one thing to assess costs and benefits of infrastructure investment plans; it was another thing to assess the impact—social, cultural, and economic—of projects for the dissemination of education, instruction, knowledge, and skills.

The intrinsic difficulties of quantifying the projects’ effects made it impossible to agree on a standardized method of cost-benefit analysis until the following decade (Porter 1995: 148–89), thanks in part to some “milestone” studies produced by the international organizations (Alacevich 2014; Kornai 1979: 76; Little and Mirrlees 1968; Dasgupta, Marglin, and Sen 1972).

A coordinated effort with the United Nations and some member countries had been initiated by TECO from the beginning. It was based on the experiences gained in the field and the criteria developed for evaluation, precisely because “the problems of evaluating technical assistance [were] very much the order of the day in international and national organizations.” The initial work focused on the need to standardize the terminologies used, to help create common standards, and to prepare evaluation processes relating to the premises, progress, and final results of projects, both in qualitative and quantitative terms.⁵⁷ Useful in this regard had been since 1963 the drafting of “country studies,”⁵⁸ then made public in agreement with the countries concerned or, as happened for example in the case of Turkey, kept confidential within the program due to disputes that arose over the results, the analysis of the country situation, or final recommendations.⁵⁹

In reality, despite the effort, none of these studies were able to link actions and program effects and measure their efficacy, as was the initial intention;⁶⁰ over time, TECO itself came to consider “probably over-ambitious” the objective of measuring the impact of actions generally aimed at the transfer of such intangible assets as knowledge and skills.⁶¹ The reports, therefore, focused on reconstructing the activities conducted and the data on the beneficiary countries,⁶² and they provided a basis for more general, purely political, evaluations, and, in any case, they became a tool deemed necessary to guide future programs.⁶³

Indeed, experiences in the field often revealed aspects that were difficult to quantify but essential; the Kosmet project evaluation, for example, listed successes in areas defined as more “popular” and, conversely, analyzed the difficulties that emerged in “unpopular” ones: “The really valuable technical assistance, in other words”—the evaluation report concluded—“is sometimes ‘unpopular.’”⁶⁴

Technical Assistance since the 1970s

As the “First Development Decade” came to a close, a process of rethinking the strategic foundations and objectives of intervention toward backward countries arose (Martin 1973: 6). Despite the “crisis” of the certainties (that investment would lead to progress) that had driven the international effort, however, the coming decade seemed to confirm the need for an expansion of assistance and technical cooperation between developed and developing countries: “The difficulties in meeting the needs are in men, rather than in money,” the director of the Development Assistance Committee had said at the Ninth World Conference of the Society for International Development held in Milan (De Lattre 1973: 11).⁶⁵

Within this framework, marked among other things by the start of the Nixon presidency, had operated the Commission on International Development, which, formally mandated by the World Bank, in late 1969 issued the famous “Pearson Report,” named after its chairman, Lester B. Pearson, former Canadian prime minister, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and founder of the FAO (Commission on International Development 1969; Brushett 2015). The report, starting with the supposed “crisis in aid,” provided an authoritative diagnosis and a new international policy agenda for the “Second Development Decade” (Commission on International Development 1969: 3).

The rethinking of global technical assistance strategies was also reflected in the TECO guidelines. A rethink was triggered in 1970 by the United States itself, in the light of the new directions of the Nixon administration and the Pearson Report, in which, in each case, the countries of “Southern Europe” were explicitly contemplated as a group (Commission on International Development 1969: 27, 317, 364). The memorandum forwarded to TECO outlined the US government's position, which aimed to maintain the commitment in technical assistance but also to raise the financial participation of recipient countries.⁶⁶ In order to escape the accusation of failing the “spirit of solidarity” repeatedly raised by the countries concerned, the US ambassador to the OECD, J. A. Greenwald, emphasized his country's financial commitment and his government's difficulty in “explaining to Congress . . . why countries which would soon have closed the gap between them and other Member Countries should not be paying more and ultimately the total amount of technical assistance.”⁶⁷ The request in the memorandum was twofold: to provide for a gradual but substantial increase in the cofinancing share of TECO countries and to shift the funding of the program from Part I of the OECD budget, that is, that fed by all countries, to Part II, that for programs involving a “limited number of members.”

The US memorandum obviously provoked opposing documents from the countries concerned and stimulated a discussion in the organization, which, moreover, provided an effective political assessment of the activities carried out. The Portuguese authorities, first,⁶⁸ stressed that TECO was “the most important of the OECD's operational activities, the only form of direct aid to less-developed Member countries.”⁶⁹ The analysis conducted, moreover, pointed out that the increase in the participation fee, already considered substantial, should be carefully evaluated so as not to undermine the “very principle of technical assistance.”⁷⁰ Similar considerations were made by representatives from Turkey, Portugal, Spain,⁷¹ and Greece, who considered the program “most vital,” especially in the face of “very frustrating” experiences in other smaller multilateral programs.⁷²

The debate was at times bitter, pitting a group of northern countries (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Great Britain, and Canada), in support of the US document, against the TECO countries, lined up in defense of TECO aid to developing countries; the TECO countries, although willing to raise the participation fee, particularly opposed the inclusion of the project in Part II of the budget; in this they found support from almost all the other member countries and even Great Britain, which, although in line with the northern bloc, nevertheless believed that moving activities explicitly provided for in the convention to Part II of the budget would set a bad precedent.⁷³ In the middle, France, Germany, and Italy, in turn, supported a synthesis paper from the secretariat of TECO in order to reconcile the almost unanimous intention to continue the program with the requirements of financial rebalancing.⁷⁴ The secretariat, in order to facilitate a synthesis of the different positions in the field, on the one hand, confirmed the importance of TECO, which concretely translated the “solidarity” of the “more favored” countries toward the “Southern European developing countries” and, on the other hand, assumed the emphasis placed by the US delegation on the low rate of coparticipation in the projects.⁷⁵ In conclusion, the proposal then approved envisaged the reorganization of the program on “five-year plans” with an a priori defined budget of 32.5 million francs and a commitment to the participation of countries according to a scheme that, starting from the average of 30 percent, would reach 55 percent over the five-year period, in fact rebalancing the organization's lower resources.⁷⁶

Genesis of PUMA, Program Epilogue

The clarification in the early 1970s initiated a gradual but radical change in TECO that affected its methods and activities as well. First of all, it was decided that the predominant share of the budget, previously directed toward planning and a few large projects, should be oriented toward solving technical problems of various kinds that plagued the countries involved.⁷⁷ This change reflected, even in the area of technical assistance, the end of the era of planning, which had accompanied the Keynesian period since postwar reconstruction, and signaled the rise of a new economic paradigm even within the organization, as later demonstrated by the publication of the so-called McCracken Report (OECD 1977; Schmelzer 2016; Teixeira 2019).

International seminars, exchange of experts, training programs, and especially “joint activities” among the TECO countries—rising to 20 percent of the total⁷⁸—increasingly focused on specific issues such as productivity, management, and the marketing of different sectors,⁷⁹ as well as topics such as transfer of technology, irrigation, tourism, and the problem of “emigrant workers,” common to these countries.⁸⁰

In the mid-1970s, owing to the consequences from the economic crisis and the profound institutional changes sweeping the countries under consideration with the collapse of dictatorial regimes (Judt 2005: 504), TECO took on renewed importance, and even the Council of Europe, in a specific resolution, expressed the urgency for the OECD “to make full use of its expertise to favor the economic and social development of those of its member countries which were at an intermediate stage of development.”⁸¹

The most innovative and fruitful strand for the future transformation of TECO concerned “urban management”⁸² and generated a project with experiments in the management of urban growth in Istanbul, the public transport and highway system in the Izmir area and the Belgrade metropolitan area, and waste services in Skopje.⁸³ By the mid-1970s, the activity that was aimed at “improving the public management system of participating countries [had] increasingly become the distinctive specialization of the cooperative action program,” and it was noted that investment in this direction should continue for the future, consistent with the organization's interest in promoting better use of resources in member countries.⁸⁴

Thus, at this stage, although TECO's activities continued to formally address national and regional planning programs, the logical framework of activities changed, and the focus shifted to the role of public administration.⁸⁵ Emblematic in this regard was the focus on the use of computers in public administration, which in 1976 led to the establishment of a group of experts to study the evolution of public structures in terms of “computerization.”⁸⁶

In the second half of the 1970s, public administration was gaining space and resources and had a pivotal moment in Madrid, in 1979, at the first symposium on “managing change in the public administration,” where the international agenda for the coming decade was set (OECD 1979).⁸⁷ From this time on, in fact, the category of public management framed almost all program activities, being applied in the various sectors, such as in agriculture with the “rural public management” project.⁸⁸ In addition, topics such as the management of central government, the management of local and metropolitan government, the control of public spending, the relationship between public administration and citizens, and administrative reform,⁸⁹ which fueled a “remarkable and pioneering series of publications” aimed at guiding reform policies (Pal 2012: 42), were also emerging.

By the dawn of the 1980s, the strategic reorientation was well underway, and the change in the nature of the program could be said to have been completed with the approval of the second five-year plan of the decade, in 1985, when the first phase of TECO, in which the organization had focused on “particular structural and development problems,” was finally archived, launching a new phase focused on the issue of public management but that opened the program to a “broader range of member countries.”⁹⁰ The new mandate,⁹¹ in fact, assigned TECO the task of “designing and implementing a co-operative program focused on improving the responsiveness and effectiveness of public management . . . to the Members and the country with special status.”⁹²

From this point on, therefore, activities were focused solely on public management and for the benefit of all members of the organization,⁹³ and, in 1989, the committee circulated internally the document titled Serving the Economy Better (OECD 1991), which, from the very title, made explicit the change of approach and made as logical as it was inevitable the transformation of the committee into a new program. The subsequent creation of the public management committee, or PUMA, definitively ended the phase of development support in terms of technical assistance to Mediterranean countries.⁹⁴

Conclusion

TECO operated for nearly three decades, punctuated by two phases distinguished by a transition process that took place from the mid-1970s. The first phase, discussed more extensively here, inherited the activities conducted by the EPA, initially mandated by the United States to infuse reconstruction policies with the “gospel of productivity” (Tiratsoo and Tomlinson 1997; Boel 2003: 10) as a means of disseminating free-market principles (Schmelzer 2016: 132; Maier 1977: 615). Soon, however, to adapt to conditions in the European periphery, agency and organization had experimented with forms of intervention inspired by development theories then in gestation. These experiences were being recontextualized in the new scenario marked by the evolution of the Cold War caused by the process of decolonization (Haefele 2003: 81; OECD 1967; Rostow 1985: 183). Thus, the role of the OECD was also being updated, and, of course, the underlying reasons for such activism were closely linked to the Cold War and its “ideology,” which animated a process of transmission of values, instrumentation, and culture, far from neutral, which, by the way, acted similarly on both sides of the Iron Curtain (Tröhler 2013: 143; Silova, Millei, and Piattoeva 2017). The drivers of this transmission were the standardization and dissemination of data, knowledge, and skills, along with the engineering of methodologies and content disseminated in activities developed globally but also, and first and foremost, in member countries, as, precisely, in the case of TECO.

A study of the activities carried out by the OECD for development in the Southern European laboratory confirms that this top-down process, evident in its intentions and motives, also interacted with another process in the opposite direction, that is, bottom-up; in other words, it was not one way but “determined in interaction” (Centeno 2018; Villani 2007; Lorenzini 2017). Certainly, through technical assistance—even in the seemingly less hierarchical version of “cooperation”—knowledge imbued with a dominant vision informing the “free world” was being transmitted, but technical assistance corresponded to the urgencies of Southern European countries, which themselves inspired the experimentation of visions and policies to promote development. The methodologies and forms of the assistance, in any case, reflected a two-pronged approach: they certainly conveyed the practice of long-term planning then in vogue and traceable to Keynesian economic culture; on the other hand, the belief that development could be promoted by imposing it from above was also flanked by different visions animated by scholars and institutions sensitive to approaches to development as the effect of galvanizing cultural and social factors of communities from below (Granata 2022a).

TECO, as a result, became a place of convergence and propagation of development ideas and relationships and, like the OECD, operated as “an octopus weaving a network of change agents” (Bürgi 2019: 29). Through assistance projects, which inserted experts into the ganglia of governments and national economic policymaking venues, it also maintained relations with countries that were only marginally integrated into international markets and institutions and ruled by dictatorial and autocratic regimes of various kinds.

In this process the role of Italian experts, in the first phase, was relevant because the pioneering experiments conducted in the Mezzogiorno had substantially inspired the organization's policies. Giorgio Ceriani Sebregondi, of Svimez, on behalf of the OECD had initiated the activities in Greece, and shortly thereafter Pasquale Saraceno had coordinated Italian technicians to support planning in that country. Prominent among them was Giulio Fossi, who, by virtue of his experience with that project, later operated in the Development Assistance Committee, where Nino Novacco, former secretary general of Svimez itself, was senior expert. Spain, too, had later requested involvement in Saraceno's activities, but Saraceno refused, opening the door to other technicians provided by OECD.⁹⁵ In Turkey, the same role was played by Jan Tinbergen, future Nobel laureate and member of the Svimez board.⁹⁶ In Portugal, the government had expressly requested the intervention of Tinbergen himself,⁹⁷ who was later replaced; finally, in Yugoslavia, regional planning activities had been led by Italconsult, which brought together all the most important public and private Italian companies and which was founded and chaired by Aurelio Peccei.⁹⁸

Finally, during the 1970s, TECO's role in defining and disseminating reform policies now aimed at the entire social base of the organization was being renewed, and the long experience of assisting public administration was being actualized. Public administration, however, was less and less understood as a lever for guiding and directing national economies toward development—as in the planning era—and increasingly seen as a tool for “serving” the economy—consistent, moreover, with the orientations of economic culture that had become prevalent at the time.

Notes

References