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19. The Desarrollo
- University of Wisconsin Press
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1~ The Desarrollo The last twenty-five years of the Franco regime, from 1950 to 1975, were the time of the greatest sustained economic development and general improvement in living standards in all Spanish history. In one sense this was not so remarkable, because it coincided with the greatest period of sustained prosperity and development in all world history as well. Nonetheless , the proportionate rise in living standards and general productivity and well-being was greater than in other right-authoritarian regimes such as that of Portugal or those in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, and it was also greater than in the totalitarian socialist regimes in eastern Europe, Asia, or Cuba. Only Japan made greater proportionate progress than Spain during this period. If Franco were to be resurrected and questioned about this, he would doubtless reply that such had been his plan all along. Certainly from the very beginning Franco and other spokesmen emphasized their determination to develop Spain's economy and achieve a higher level of well-being, yet the policies and institutions under which the desarrollo was consummated were quite different from those on which the regime had originally embarked in the 1940s. Moreover, the reestablishment of Spanish influence in the world that was to accompany this never really occurred, while the remarkable cultural and religious counterrevolution carried out in Spain during the late 1930s and 1940s was totally undermined by the social , cultural, and economic changes wrought by development, as, in the long run, were the basic institutions and values of the regime itself. 463 464 IV. Developmentalism and Decay, 1959-1975 The Last Phase of Autarchy The regime's economic policies during the 1940s continued to be based on a modified semi-autarchy and import substitution. Rapprochement with the United States brought closer association with the international economy , but it only partially altered official policy, which was based on the firmly fixed world view of Franco and his closest associates. The outer world, even in the West, was seen as fundamentally hostile to the regime and to Spanish culture,I so that it would always be incumbent on the country's domestic economy to become as strong and as independent as possible. Though he considered economics of prime importance, Franco did not believe that economics required autonomy or needed to respond to market forces. Like most twentieth-century dictators, he continued to believe in the primacy of politics and that state power was capable of bending economics to its will. The goal of force-drafting the economy with annual investment rates of 15 percent or more per year was largely achieved during the 1950s. Investment had begun to rise in 1948. It provided increasing support for electrical development and certain key industries by 1950, the commercial structure by 1951, the banking system by 1952, and public works by 1953. This policy continued to offer major tax advantages and even guaranteed profits to favored firms, requiring the consumption ofdomestically produced goods as much as possible irrespective of price. Imports continued to be restricted, foreign exchange controlled, foreign trade regulated by the state, and direct intervention practiced through incentives and licensing for both exports and imports, together with the major investments of the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI). Whereas the INI pushed fuels, fertilizers, and electric power during the 1940s, in the fifties it emphasized metallurgy and automobiles through large new enterprises such as ENSIDESA (Asturias) and SEAT (Barcelona). It was empowered to borrow large amounts of money from the Bank of Spain at only three-quarters of one percent interest, and savings institutions were required to place half their investment funds in INI stock.2 This import-substitution industrialization registered major gains during the 1950s. Its real growth of GNP at an average annual rate of7.9 percent 1. To the ends of their days, Franco and Carrero Blanco believed that the implacable enmity toward the regime of the Communist world was paralleled by that of "international Masonry" in the West. Even after economic policy had changed, Carrero Blanco would hector the foreign minister on the conspiracies of the "three Internationals": Communism in the East, Socialism in western Europe, and Masonry in liberal countries generally. Cf. Vinas, Guerra, dinero, dictadura, 230-35. 2. On the INI in this period, see Schwartz and Gonzalez, Una historia, 68-85. The nationalist doctrines underpinning autarchist policy were presented fairly clearly in a collection ofarticles from Arriba in 1953-54 reprinted in Notas sobre politica economica espanola (Madrid...