The Influence of Jan Tinbergen on Dutch Economic Policy

Abstract

From the mid-1920s to the early 1960s, Jan Tinbergen was actively engaged in discussions about Dutch economic policy. He was the first director of the Central Planning Bureau, from 1945 to 1955. It took quite some time and effort to find an effective role for this Bureau vis-à-vis the political decision makers in the REA, a subgroup of the Council of Ministers. Partly as a result of that, Tinbergen's direct influence on Dutch (macro)economic policy appears to have been rather small until 1950. In that year two new advisory bodies were established, the Social and Economic Council (SER) and the Central Economic Committee. Tinbergen was an influential member of both, which effectively raised his impact on economic policy. In the early fifties he played an important role in shaping the Dutch consensus economy. In addition, his indirect influence has been substantial, as the methods and tools that he developed gained widespread acceptance in the Netherlands and in many other countries.

Entangled Economists

“…Tinbergen, although he too has been accused of technocratic tendencies, was much more successful in achieving co-operation with politicians. Sometimes this was against his will, as when the Central Planning Bureau of which he was a director between 1945 and 1955 was made less prominent in economic policymaking than he had hoped (Don 2019). But generally, he was well aware of the importance of the appropriate institutional position of policy advice within the polity (Tinbergen 1954), and the practical usefulness (and costliness) of particular methods was always on his mind.…”

Recovering Tinbergen

“…(Calculating the policy response to imported cycles, and consequently the optimum policy in those circumstances was more difficult and opened up more questions.) Thus, Tinbergen's preferred policy to get the economy out of its rut-based on his testing regimes-was to come off the gold standard (with some additional labour plan), which indeed was the policy undertaken, though it is unlikely (Don 2019) that this was due to Tinbergen. His modelling project had been presented to the Dutch professional association of economists (who were by no means all receptive to his approach), and he was a young man with not much clout or reputation, certainly not sufficient to prompt such a definitive policy based on such an untried mode of argument that was extraordinary for the time.…”

Jan Tinbergen: Engineering a Better World

“…One of his answers is that Tinbergen viewed his research as an input to designing effective planning policies, an unpopular way of vending academic research but much in line with an engineering approach to signalling and solving social problems. In a third paper, Don (2019) shows that the motivation of much of his early work indeed was initiated by a strong desire to improve economic policies and that planning was an important part of this desire.…”