This comprehensive history, published jointly by the IMF and Oxford University Press, was written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of international monetary cooperation. From the establishment of the postwar international monetary system in 1944 to how the framework functions in a vastly expanded world economy, historian Harol James describes the tensions, negotiations, challenges, and progress of international monetary cooperation. This narrative offers a global perspective on the events and decisions that have shaped the world economy during the past fifty years.

The IMF Working Papers series is designed to make IMF staff research available to a wide audience. Almost 300 Working Papers are released each year, covering a wide range of theoretical and analytical topics, including balance of payments, monetary and fiscal issues, global liquidity, and national and international economic developments.

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.

This volume, fourth in a series of periodic histories of the institution, is as much a history of the world economy during 1979-89 as one of the IMF itself. Boughton discusses the IMF's surveillance of the international monetary system in the 1980s; the Fund's role in the international debt crisis of the 1980s, and IMF lending in support of structural adjustment in low-income countries during that period. The volume concludes with a general history of the institution, including the quota system, the SDR, membership, and other institutional matters.

High public debt often produces the drama of default and restructuring. But debt is also reduced through financial repression, a tax on bondholders and savers via negative or belowmarket real interest rates. After WWII, capital controls and regulatory restrictions created a captive audience for government debt, limiting tax-base erosion. Financial repression is most successful in liquidating debt when accompanied by inflation. For the advanced economies, real interest rates were negative 1⁄2 of the time during 1945–1980. Average annual interest expense savings for a 12—country sample range from about 1 to 5 percent of GDP for the full 1945–1980 period. We suggest that, once again, financial repression may be part of the toolkit deployed to cope with the most recent surge in public debt in advanced economies.

Written by Margaret Garritsen de Vries, former Historian of the IMF, the book describes the policies and activities the IMF has pursued in helping members achieve balane of payments adjustment. Separate treatment is given to industrial and developing countries, since their balance of payments problems have differed. As examples, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Colombia, and Mexico as discussed.