This volume, edited by James M. Boughton and K. Sarwar Lateef, contains the proceedings of a conference held in Madrid, Spain, in 1994, by the IMF and the World Bank to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944 that created the two institutions. The...

All financial institutions specialize, in dimensions that may include categories of assets and liabilities, types of services offered, customer demographics, and geographic coverage. The International Monetary Fund is the only international financial institution that is universal in its...

This pamphlet is adapted from Chapter 1 of Silent Revolution: The International Monetary Fund, 1979-89, by the same author. That book is full of history of the evolution of the Fund during 11 years in which the institution truly came of age as a participant in the international financial system

IMF lending is conditional on a country''s commitment to carry out an agreed program of economic policies. Unless that commitment is genuine and broadly held, the likelihood of implementation will be poor. Is there a conflict between national commitment and conditional finance? Are national...

The CFA franc zone comprises a group of countries in central and west Africa whose currencies have been firmly linked to the French franc since 1948. It combines the features of a currency union with those of an exchange rate peg, and an analysis of its effectiveness must examine both...

The low level of primary commodity prices since 1985 is examined in the context of the behavior of those prices relative to prices of manufactured goods since 1854. The Prebisch-Singer hypothesis of a secular decline in relative commodity prices is sustained, but the recent decline is shown to...

The international monetary system is largely the product of negotiations during World War II between U.S. and U.K. officials, led respectively by Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes. The design of the system, especially the International Monetary Fund, reflects the U.S. plan much more...

Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the failed attempt by France, Israel, and Britain to retake it by force constituted a serious political crisis with significant economic consequences. For the United Kingdom, it engendered a financial crisis as well. That all four of the...

Much of the debate about the management of financial crises has focused on structural and psychological issues regarding the conditions that are supposed to be necessary to restore investor confidence. Nonetheless, the paramount requirement in the short term is for countries in crisis to adopt...

The International Monetary Fund was designed during World War II by men whose worldview had been shaped by the Great War and the Great Depression. Their views on how the postwar international monetary system should function were also shaped by their economics training and their nationalities....