Proposals for Future Trade Strategy

Towards the end of World War II, many of the world’s most expert officials on commercial and monetary affairs, with many of the most highly qualified academics in the field, were engaged on a new and challenging exercise, the deliberate planning of institutional arrangements that would together constitute a viable framework for the re-establishment of a liberal international system of trade and payments. The Bretton Woods negotiations, as they were called, after the location of the exercise in the United States, produced two institutions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) was established as a means of improving the system of payments and currencies. In order to augment the flow of capital from rich to poor countries, there was also established the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), otherwise known as the World Bank Almost concurrently, negotiations in Geneva produced, in place of the originally intended International Trade Organisation, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as an instrument for pursuing the liberalisation of world trade.1