What Governments Want from International Economic Institutions and How they Get It

In: Government & opposition: an international journal of comparative politics, Band 32, Heft 3, S. 361-379

Abstract

MANY INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS, FOUNDED DURING OR JUST AFTER the Second World War, are passing their fiftieth anniversaries, which have become the occasions for reviewing their past performance and looking into the future. This has already happened for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, launched at Bretton Woods in 1944; and for the United Nations (UN), inaugurated in 1945. The fiftieth anniversary of the Marshall Plan, the origin (at one remove) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), falls in the summer of 1997. The anniversary of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) is not till 1998. But the end of the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations and the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) have already prompted some backward looks.