a short history of the imf

Some interesting info for gold bugs and others on the formation and history of the IMF through to the WTO .

(Taken from IMF webpage).

THE ORIGINS OF THE IMF

The IMF was conceived in July 1944 at a United Nations conference held at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, U.S.A. when representatives of 45 governments agreed on a framework for economic cooperation designed to avoid a repetition of the disastrous economic policies that had contributed to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

During that decade, as economic activity in the major industrial countries weakened, countries attempted to defend their economies by increasing restrictions on imports; but this just worsened the downward spiral in world trade, output, and employment. To conserve dwindling reserves of gold and foreign exchange, some countries curtailed their citizens' freedom to buy abroad, some devalued their currencies, and some introduced complicated restrictions on their citizens' freedom to hold foreign exchange. These fixes, however, also proved self-defeating, and no country was able to maintain its competitive edge for long. Such "beggar-thy-neighbor" policies devastated the international economy; world trade declined sharply, as did employment and living standards in many countries.

As World War II came to a close, the leading allied countries considered various plans to restore order to international monetary relations, and at the Bretton Woods conference the IMF emerged. The country representatives drew up the charter (or Articles of Agreement) of an international institution to oversee the international monetary system and to promote both the elimination of exchange restrictions relating to trade in goods and services, and the stability of exchange rates.

The IMF came into existence in December 1945, when the first 29 countries signed its Articles of Agreement.

The statutory purposes of the IMF today are the same as when they were formulated in 1944 (see Box 2). Since then, the world has experienced unprecedented growth in real incomes. And although the benefits of growth have not flowed equally to all—either within or among nations—most countries have seen increases in prosperity that contrast starkly with the interwar period, in particular. Part of the explanation lies in improvements in the conduct of economic policy, including policies that have encouraged the growth of international trade and helped smooth the economic cycle of boom and bust. The IMF is proud to have contributed to these developments.

In the decades since World War II, apart from rising prosperity, the world economy and monetary system have undergone other major changes—changes that have increased the importance and relevance of the purposes served by the IMF, but that have also required the IMF to adapt and reform. Rapid advances in technology and communications have contributed to the increasing international integration of markets and to closer linkages among national economies. As a result financial crises, when they erupt, now tend to spread more rapidly among countries.

In such an increasingly integrated and interdependent world, any country's prosperity depends more than ever both on the economic performance of other countries and on the existence of an open and stable global economic environment. Equally, economic and financial policies that individual countries follow affect how well or how poorly the world trade and payments system operates. Globalization thus calls for greater international cooperation, which in turn has increased the responsibilities of international institutions that organize such cooperation—including the IMF.

The IMF's purposes have also become more important simply because of the expansion of its membership. The number of IMF member countries has more than quadrupled from the 45 states involved in its establishment, reflecting in particular the attainment of political independence by many developing countries and more recently the collapse of the Soviet bloc.

The expansion of the IMF's membership, together with the changes in the world economy, have required the IMF to adapt in a variety of ways to continue serving its purposes effectively.

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Box 2
The IMF's Purposes

The purposes of the International Monetary Fund are:


i. To promote international monetary cooperation through a permanent institution which provides the machinery for consultation and collaboration on international monetary problems.

ii. To facilitate the expansion and balanced growth of international trade, and to contribute thereby to the promotion and maintenance of high levels of employment and real income and to the development of the productive resources of all members as primary objectives of economic policy.

iii. To promote exchange stability, to maintain orderly exchange arrangements among members, and to avoid competitive exchange depreciation.

iv. To assist in the establishment of a multilateral system of payments in respect of current transactions between members and in the elimination of foreign exchange restrictions which hamper the growth of world trade.

v. To give confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity.

vi. In accordance with the above, to shorten the duration and lessen the degree of disequilibrium in the international balances of payments of members.


The Fund shall be guided in all its policies and decisions by the purposes set forth in this Article.

From Article I of the IMF's Articles of Agreement

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Countries that joined the IMF between 1945 and 1971 agreed to keep their exchange rates (in effect, the value of their currencies in terms of the U.S. dollar, and in the case of the United States, the value of the U.S. dollar in terms of gold) pegged at rates that could be adjusted, but only to correct a "fundamental disequilibrium" in the balance of payments and with the IMF's concurrence. This so-called Bretton Woods system of exchange rates prevailed until 1971 when the U.S. government suspended the convertibility of the U.S. dollar (and dollar reserves held by other governments) into gold. Since then, IMF members have been free to choose any form of exchange arrangement they wish (except pegging their currency to gold): some now allow their currency to float freely, some peg their currency to another currency or a group of currencies, some have adopted the currency of another country as their own, and some participate in currency blocs.

At the same time as the IMF was created, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), more commonly known as the World Bank, was set up to promote long-term economic development, including through the financing of infrastructure projects, such as road-building and improving water supply.

The IMF and the World Bank Group—which includes the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the International Development Association (IDA)—complement each other's work. While the IMF's focus is chiefly on macroeconomic performance, and on macroeconomic and financial sector policies, the World Bank is concerned mainly with longer-term development and poverty reduction issues. Its activities include lending to developing countries and countries in transition to finance infrastructure projects, the reform of particular sectors of the economy, and broader structural reforms. The IMF, in contrast, provides financing not for particular sectors or projects but for general support of a country's balance of payments and international reserves while the country takes policy action to address its difficulties.

When the IMF and World Bank were established, an organization to promote world trade liberalization was also contemplated, but it was not until 1995 that the World Trade Organization was set up. In the intervening years, trade issues were tackled through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

WHO MAKES DECISIONS AT THE IMF?

The IMF is accountable to its member countries, and this accountability is essential to its effectiveness. The day-to-day work of the IMF is carried out by an Executive Board, representing the IMF's 184 members, and an internationally recruited staff under the leadership of a Managing Director and three Deputy Managing Directors—each member of this management team being drawn from a different region of the world. The powers of the Executive Board to conduct the business of the IMF are delegated to it by the Board of Governors, which is where ultimate oversight rests.

The Board of Governors, on which all member countries are represented, is the highest authority governing the IMF. It usually meets once a year, at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and the World Bank. Each member country appoints a Governor—usually the country's minister of finance or the governor of its central bank—and an Alternate Governor. The Board of Governors decides on major policy issues but has delegated day-to-day decision-making to the Executive Board.

Key policy issues relating to the international monetary system are considered twice-yearly in a committee of Governors called the International Monetary and Financial Committee, or IMFC (until September 1999 known as the Interim Committee). A joint committee of the Boards of Governors of the IMF and World Bank called the Development Committee advises and reports to the Governors on development policy and other matters of concern to developing countries.

The Executive Board consists of 24 Executive Directors, with the Managing Director as chairman. The Executive Board usually meets three times a week, in full-day sessions, and more often if needed, at the organization's headquarters in Washington, D.C. The IMF's five largest shareholders—the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom—along with China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia, have their own seats on the Board. The other 16 Executive Directors are elected for two-year terms by groups of countries, known as constituencies.

The documents that provide the basis for the Board's deliberations are prepared mainly by IMF staff, sometimes in collaboration with the World Bank, and presented to the Board with management approval; but some documents are presented by Executive Directors themselves. In recent years, an increasing proportion of IMF Board documents have been released to the public through the IMF's website (www.imf.org).

Unlike some international organizations that operate under a one-country-one-vote principle (such as the United Nations General Assembly), the IMF has a weighted voting system: the larger a country's quota in the IMF—determined broadly by its economic size—the more votes it has (see "Where Does the IMF Get its Money?" below). But the Board rarely makes decisions based on formal voting; rather, most decisions are based on consensus among its members and are supported unanimously.

The Executive Board selects the Managing Director, who besides serving as the chairman of the Board, is the chief of the IMF staff and conducts the business of the IMF under the direction of the Executive Board. Appointed for a renewable five-year term, the Managing Director is assisted by a First Deputy Managing Director and two other Deputy Managing Directors.

IMF employees are international civil servants whose responsibility is to the IMF, not to national authorities. The organization has about 2,800 employees recruited from 133 countries. About two-thirds of its professional staff are economists. The IMF's 23 departments and offices are headed by directors, who report to the Managing Director. Most staff work in Washington, although about 80 resident representatives are posted in member countries to help advise on economic policy. The IMF maintains offices in Paris and Tokyo for liaison with other international and regional institutions, and with organizations of civil society; it also has offices in New York and Geneva, mainly for liaison with other institutions in the UN system.

Where Does the IMF Get Its Money?
The IMF's resources come mainly from the quota (or capital) subscriptions that countries pay when they join the IMF, or following periodic reviews in which quotas are increased. Countries pay 25 percent of their quota subscriptions in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs, see Box 3) or major currencies, such as U.S. dollars or Japanese yen; the IMF can call on the remainder, payable in the member's own currency, to be made available for lending as needed. Quotas determine not only a country's subscription payments, but also its voting power, the amount of financing that it can receive from the IMF, and its share in SDR allocations.

Quotas are intended broadly to reflect members' relative size in the world economy: the larger a country's economy in terms of output, and the larger and more variable its trade, the higher its quota tends to be. The United States of America, the world's largest economy, contributes most to the IMF, 17.6 percent of total quotas; Seychelles, the world's smallest, contributes 0.004 percent. The most recent (eleventh) quota review came into effect in January 1999, raising IMF quotas (for the first time since 1990) by about 45 percent to SDR 212 billion (about $290 billion).

If necessary, the IMF may borrow to supplement the resources available from its quotas.