Il divario tecnologico tra Stati Uniti e Europa occidentale: quadro generale dei tentativi di identificazione nel dibattito degli anni '60 e il contributo italiano

Abstract

In the aftermath of the World War II the Western Europeans had to cope with the rise of eco-nomic, industry, productivity and technology gaps between them and the United States. In the ’60s the technology gap became the main topic of several debates and as such the causes behind it were analysed from different points of view, having particular regards to the economic and productivity features. How-ever, the US-European gap was not only an economic organization matter, but the European integration-related dimension contributed to broaden it. In these terms, this work aims at providing a general frame-work of the overall efforts made in order to indentify firstly the economic reasons behind the technology gap, secondly the political efforts made to overcome it towards technological collaboration at transatlan-tic level in the ‘60s. Therefore, the second part of this paper will focus on the Fanfani Proposal of creat-ing a Marshall Plan for Technology, the study conducted by the OECD and the Hornig Committe ap-pointed under the Johnson Administration.