Question: The Marshall Plan had what effect on the region's trade flow
About the article "Marshall Plan", section "Wartime destruction".

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The Marshall Plan was originally scheduled to end in 1953.
Any effort to extend it was halted by the growing cost of the Korean War and rearmament.
American Republicans hostile to the plan had also gained seats in the 1950 Congressional elections, and conservative opposition to the plan was revived.
Thus the plan ended in 1951, though various other forms of American aid to Europe continued afterwards.
The years 1948 to 1952 saw the fastest period of growth in European history.
Industrial production increased by 35%.
Agricultural production substantially surpassed pre-war levels.
The poverty and starvation of the immediate postwar years disappeared, and Western Europe embarked upon an unprecedented two decades of growth that saw standards of living increase dramatically.
There is some debate among historians over how much this should be credited to the Marshall Plan.
Most reject the idea that it alone miraculously revived Europe, as evidence shows that a general recovery was already underway.
Most believe that the Marshall Plan sped this recovery, but did not initiate it.
The United States worked to direct the Marshall Plan towards children and an increase of nutritional material for all citizens within western Europe so as to shed a positive light on its goals as it worked to effectively defeat communist threats.
One effect of the plan was that it subtly "Americanized" countries, especially Austria, who embraced United States' assistance, through popular culture, such as Hollywood movies and rock n' roll (Bischof, Pelinka and Stiefel 174-175).
The political effects of the Marshall Plan may have been just as important as the economic ones.
Marshall Plan aid allowed the nations of Western Europe to relax austerity measures and rationing, reducing discontent and bringing political stability.
The communist influence on Western Europe was greatly reduced, and throughout the region communist parties faded in popularity in the years after the Marshall Plan.
The trade relations fostered by the Marshall Plan helped forge the North Atlantic alliance that would persist throughout the Cold War.
At the same time, the nonparticipation of the states of Eastern Europe was one of the first clear signs that the continent was now divided.
The Marshall Plan also played an important role in European integration.
Both the Americans and many of the European leaders felt that European integration was necessary to secure the peace and prosperity of Europe, and thus used Marshall Plan guidelines to foster integration.
In some ways this effort failed, as the OEEC never grew to be more than an agent of economic cooperation.
Rather it was the separate European Coal and Steel Community, which notably excluded Britain, that would eventually grow into the European Union.
However, the OEEC served as both a testing and training ground for the structures that would later be used by the European Economic Community.
The Marshall Plan, linked into the Bretton Woods system, also mandated free trade throughout the region.
While some historians today feel some of the praise for the Marshall Plan is exaggerated, it is still viewed favorably and many thus feel that a similar project would help other areas of the world.
After the fall of communism several proposed a "Marshall Plan for Eastern Europe" that would help revive that region.
Others have proposed a Marshall Plan for Africa to help that continent, and U.S. vice president Al Gore suggested a Global Marshall Plan.
"Marshall Plan" has become a metaphor for any very large scale government program that is designed to solve a specific social problem.
It is usually used when calling for federal spending to correct a perceived failure of the private sector. 
The Marshall Plan aid was divided amongst the participant states on a roughly per capita basis.
A larger amount was given to the major industrial powers, as the prevailing opinion was that their resuscitation was essential for general European revival.
Somewhat more aid per capita was also directed towards the Allied nations, with less for those that had been part of the Axis or remained neutral.
The table below shows Marshall Plan aid by country and year (in millions of dollars) from "The Marshall Plan Fifty Years Later."
There is no clear consensus on exact amounts, as different scholars differ on exactly what elements of American aid during this period were part of the Marshall Plan. 
By the end of World War II, much of Europe was devastated.
Sustained aerial bombardment during the war had badly damaged most major cities, and industrial facilities were especially hard-hit.
The region's trade flows had been thoroughly disrupted; millions were in refugee camps living on aid from United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration and other agencies.
Food shortages were severe, especially in the harsh winter of 1946–1947.
Especially damaged was transportation infrastructure, as railways, bridges, and docks had been specifically targeted by air strikes, while much merchant shipping had been sunk.
Although most small towns and villages had not suffered as much damage, the destruction of transportation left them economically isolated.
None of these problems could be easily remedied, as most nations engaged in the war had exhausted their treasuries in its execution.
The only major powers whose infrastructure had not been significantly harmed in World War II were the United States and Canada.
They were much more prosperous than before the war but exports were a small factor in their economy.
Much of the Marshall Plan aid would be used by the Europeans to buy manufactured goods and raw materials from the United States and Canada.
The reconstruction plan, developed at a meeting of the participating European states, was established on June 5, 1947.
It offered the same aid to the Soviet Union and its allies, but they did not accept it, as to do so would be to allow a degree of US control over the Communist economies.
During the four years that the plan was operational, US donated $15 billion in economic and technical assistance to help the recovery of the European countries that had joined in the Organization for European Economic Co-operation.
In 2013, the equivalent sum reflecting currency inflation since 1948 totalled roughly $148 billion.
The $15 billion was in the context of a US GDP of $258 billion in 1948, and was on top of $15 billion in American aid to Europe between the end of the war and the start of the Plan that is counted separately from the Marshall Plan.
The Marshall Plan was replaced by the Mutual Security Plan at the end of 1951.
The ERP addressed each of the obstacles to postwar recovery.
The plan looked to the future, and did not focus on the destruction caused by the war.
Much more important were efforts to modernize European industrial and business practices using high-efficiency American models, reducing artificial trade barriers, and instilling a sense of hope and self-reliance.
By 1952, as the funding ended, the economy of every participant state had surpassed pre-war levels; for all Marshall Plan recipients, output in 1951 was at least 35% higher than in 1938.
Over the next two decades, Western Europe enjoyed unprecedented growth and prosperity, but economists are not sure what proportion was due directly to the ERP, what proportion indirectly, and how much would have happened without it.
A common American interpretation of the program's role in European recovery is the one expressed by Paul Hoffman, head of the Economic Cooperation Administration, in 1949, when he told Congress that Marshall aid had provided the "critical margin" on which other investment needed for European recovery depended.
The Marshall Plan was one of the first elements of European integration, as it erased trade barriers and set up institutions to coordinate the economy on a continental level — that is, it stimulated the total political reconstruction of western Europe.
Belgian economic historian Herman Van der Wee concludes the Marshall Plan was a "great success": "It gave a new impetus to reconstruction in Western Europe and made a decisive contribution to the renewal of the transport system, the modernization of industrial and agricultural equipment, the resumption of normal production, the raising of productivity, and the facilitating of intra-European trade."
Late in World War II, as Nazi-Germany’s eventual defeat appeared clear, Henry Morgenthau, Jr., then-Secretary of the United States Treasury, advocated the partitioning of Germany, stripping it of its most valuable raw materials and industrial assets, and envisioned the complete pastoralization of Germany.
Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill agreed to the Morgenthau Plan, in modified form, on 16 September 1944.
Following victory, Germany’s remaining factories were dismantled, parts, machinery, and equipment shipped abroad, patents expropriated, research forbidden, and useful engineers and scientists transferred out of the country.
Despite the negotiation of international treaties at Bretton Woods to create a set of complementary global monetary, trade, and reconstruction and development institutions, namely the International Monetary Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (today part of the World Bank Group), and, separately, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (incorporated in today’s World Trade Organization), Germany’s and Europe’s other postwar economies collapsed.
Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace appeared to repeat themselves.
However, Roosevelt had died and Harry S. Truman assumed the U.S. American Presidency on 12 April 1945.
Even as the deindustrialization of Germany proceeded as planned, Truman’s first Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes, by 1947 took a dismal view of its effects on Germany’s impoverished population.
So did former president Herbert C. Hoover in a series of reports penned in 1947.
Meanwhile, Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union emerged as a formidable power and the implication seemed clear: An economically strengthened, resurgent Germany could either be part of a new Western political, economic, and cultural alliance or else be incorporated into a Soviet one.
Truman thus came to abolish the punitive measures imposed on Germany, and his new Secretary of State, General George C. Marshall, formulated what would become the Marshall Plan, in effect from 1948 to 1952.
The new global institutions and the unilateral Marshall Plan action combined to endow new institutions with sufficient resources to result in a somewhat unwitting peace economics: clearly designed toward the purpose of international peace and prosperity, yet skewed toward Western Europe and the incipient Cold War.
Moreover, the new social architecture was invested with incentives, such as the United Nations Security Council that provided five of its members with permanent seats and veto powers, that, while keeping superpower peace, threatened peace and prosperity in the post-colonial Third World.