Lecture by Iason-Nikolaos Rodopoulos

Iason-Nikolaos Rodopoulos (Ph.D. candidate, Department of History, York University), “The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Greek Industry”

In 1947, the decision of the United States to finance the rebuilding of the Greek economy led to the creation of AMAG (American Mission for Aid to Greece). AMAG was initially responsible for managing the subsequent financial assistance provided by the United States through the Marshall Plan. For the next decades, the funds were distributed to Greek industry in the form of loans from the Greek banks, upon approval by the governmental KED (Central Committee of Loans), which was replaced by OHOA (Organization of Financing Economic Growth) in 1954 and by ETVA (Greek Bank of Industrial Growth) ten years later.

Ongoing doctoral research in primary sources, found mostly in the Archives of the Cultural Foundation of the Bank of Piraeus, the General State Archives, and the Archives of the Public Power Corporation, attempts to critically re-examine the Greek “economic miracle” by attempting to find the criteria by which companies were receiving or denied funds provided by the Marshall Plan and how financing was used at the company and sector level. Through this lecture, the findings of the research thus far will be presented, as an attempt to formulate the historical context within which Greek industry was reconstructed after World War Two, reached unprecedented economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, but started declining in the 1970s.