8 - Foreign trade

Summary

The Stabilisation Plan of 1959, which set out the Franco regime's commitment to liberalise the country's economic relations with the rest of the world, constitutes a vital turning point in the economic history of twentieth-century Spain. After the failures and disappointments of the previous two decades of autarkic development, based on a series of costly attempts at import substitution, the new breed of technocratic ministers, appointed in 1957, embarked on a course of action designed to incorporate the Spanish economy into the resurgent international system. Throughout the period 1939–59, a combination of the regime's ideological adherence to economic nationalism, bureaucratic inertia and the entrenched protectionist sentiments of powerful farming and industrial lobbies, frustrated any attempt, whether internal or external in origin, to open up Spain to the benefits of foreign trade and inward investment. The latter option, Ramón Tamames contends, was available to Spanish policy makers at least five years before the elaboration of the Stabilisation Plan. Had Trade Minister Manuel Arburúa shown more than a rhetorical commitment in the mid-1950s to opening up the Spanish economy, he might reasonably have expected enthusiastic support from the US administration, at that time providing the Franco regime with all-important foreign aid (Tamames, 1970; Gámir, 1980).

Arburú's miserable failure to stimulate sufficient exports, particularly manufactures, to finance imports of raw materials and capital goods, together with the exhaustion of American aid after 1956, revealed the bankruptcy of Francoist economic policy.