Markets and Costs of Using Markets

Abstract

There was a fundamental shift in intellectual thinking from the embrace of state planning to the belief in free markets during the second half of the twentieth century. When the world came out of World War II, state planning and public ownership was unmistakably in the ascendant. Spectacular economic growth in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries in the immediate postwar period was widely acknowledged and studied. Nationalization of certain industries became the trend even in capitalist Western Europe. As for the developing countries, state planning and direction were the methods of the day.