Modern International Law: Sources, Sovereignty, and Institutions

Alongside the political reconstruction of the postwar order, the Allied powers undertook a parallel project of rebuilding the international economic system. The Bretton Woods Conference, held at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944 and attended by representatives of forty-four Allied nations, established the International Monetary Fund, tasked with maintaining exchange-rate stability and providing short-term balance-of-payments support, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (the World Bank's founding institution), tasked initially with financing European reconstruction and later broader development. The conference also set the framework for a fixed but adjustable exchange-rate system pegged to the U.S. dollar, itself convertible to gold, and though a proposed International Trade Organization failed to secure ratification, its place was partly filled by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947), marking the emergence of international economic law as a distinct and increasingly important branch of the discipline.