The U.S.-sponsored program implemented following the Second World War to aide European countries that had been destroyed as a result of the war. The Marshall Plan was laid out by U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall during an address at Harvard University in 1947, and it was authorized by Congress as the European Recovery Program (ERP). 



|||The Marshall Plan gave over $13 billion in aide to European nations and was key in revitalizing their post-war economies. By the time U.S. funding ended in 1952, the economies of all the European recipients had surpassed pre-war levels, and the plan was considered a success.