By 1952, seven years after the war and at the effective end of the Marshall Plan, incomes per capita were 15 percent above pre-war levels. I from the Great Depression. Post-World War II Europe managed to obtain rapid political and financial stability on the one hand and avoid extended controls on internal prices and quantities that would disable the market mechanism on the other. It did not make Europe prosperous by accelerating the pace of European investment. It did not significantly transform Europe by easing bottlenecks, for in a well-functioning market economy it is hard to argue that such bottlenecks had more than a transient impact on the level of production.
Market economies are best at finding and making use of possibilities for substitution.
Had European political economy taken a different turn, post-World War II European recovery might have been hobbled by government actions that cramped market mechanisms. Perhaps clumsy allocative bureaucracies would have rationed scarce foreign exchange, and placed ceiling prices on exportables to protect the consumption of urban working classes. The war had given post-WWII Europe substantial experience with economic planning and rationing. Militant urban working classes calling for wealth redistribution and an end to the sytem tht had brought Great Depressions voted Communist in such numbers as to make the Communist Party a potential part of a permanent ruling political coalition in France and Italy. In fact, the Marshall Plan era saw a rapid dismantling of controls over product and factor markets in Western Europe.