This useful volume on the productivity missions to America after the Second World War is based on a 1997 conference in Caen, which acted as a preconference for the 1998 International Economic History Congress in Madrid. The missions were established by countries receiving Marshall Aid, and although there is a voluminous literature on the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), there is very little available in English on other European countries and Japan, so this volume plugs an important gap in the literature.

In the first section on the United States and its actions on the international scene, useful chapters by John Gillingham and Jacqueline McGlade make clear that the origins of the missions came from within Europe, overawed during the Second World War by the American productive effort. Indeed, American businessmen were not particularly keen to help European industry become more competitive and take markets away from them. However, American progressives were keen to promote state-sponsored modernization in Europe as they lost influence at home, and as the Cold War progressed more conservative elements in the United States were keen to raise European productivity as a way of freeing up resources for defense spending. None of this, however, should be allowed to detract form the great generosity of U.S. actions at this time. Productivity missions typically allowed managers and workers from a European industry to make a visit to the United States, where they attended presentations and were shown around factories. Very few requests to visit plants were turned down. To put this in perspective, imagine modern European manufacturers showing teams of South Korean or Taiwanese experts around their best factories with a view to helping them adopt best practice at home!

The first section ends with chapters on Norway, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, which leads into the second section on further national experiences: two chapters on the United Kingdom, three on France, and three on Japan. One of the most striking features of this section is the very different assessments of the authors on the impact of the program. Whereas both chapters on the United Kingdom take it for granted that the AACP was a failure, the authors of the chapters on France are equally clear that the Association Française pour l'Amélioration de la Productivité (AFAP) was a tremendous success, and the Japanese chapters take an equally upbeat view of the productivity missions. Because the individual chapters use quite different methods, the reader can only speculate on the reasons for these very different evaluations.

The third section on productivity missions and their implementation sector by sector focuses on three particular industries: iron and steel, electrical goods, and rubber. The selection of industries is not explained, and I could not help wondering what impact a different choice would have had on the general tone of the volume. The productivity missions were heavily tied up with the issue of mass production methods, and although the industry studies here all tackle issues of volume production, they are not the obvious ones to illustrate the theme of Europe's experience with mass production.

The fourth section, on the fall-out from the productivity missions, is potentially the most interesting for the nonspecialist reader. The unexplained decision to base it entirely on the French experience is therefore regrettable, particularly given the comparatively optimistic evaluation of the French authors. One obvious problem here is that most of the authors eschew quantification and appear equally skeptical towards economic analysis. Surely in attempting to assess the impact of the missions it would be helpful to have some basic data on starting levels of productivity and subsequent growth rates. I could not help thinking, for instance, that the reason for the negative evaluation of the British authors and the positive evaluation of the French authors may have had something to do with the relatively slow productivity growth achieved in postwar Britain, compared with the rapidly growing French economy. And yet this may have had rather more to do with the fact that France was further behind the United States than Britain at the end of the war than with the impact of the productivity missions. It is also important to make a distinction between the impact of the missions on the institutions and structures of industry and the impact of any such changes on productivity. For it is not difficult to make the case that British industry Americanized more than any other European industry, and the AACP may well have been successful in this respect. The problem is that the excessive Americanization of British industry was damaging, and the European countries that succeeded did so largely on the basis of a more skilled, labor-intensive, flexible production system, of which Germany was the most successful example. As François Crouzet notes, half a century after the productivity missions, it is clear that European industry has continued to follow a separate path, which he calls the Rhenish model.

However, it would be inappropriate to end on a critical note. This is a very valuable book, which is bound to become the standard reference work in an important area. The introduction by Barjot and the conclusion by Crouzet are very effective, providing between them a really excellent overview and guide to the individual chapters.