Bretton Woods @ 80: A Retrospective.

Eighty years after the Bretton Woods conference that charted out a road map for post-World War II reconstruction, the global economy is facing troublesome economic imbalances, soaring domestic political tensions over income distribution, flaring international conflict over industrial policies, and the failure of international cooperation in addressing potentially existential governance challenges in attenuating climate change and the governance of the digital transformation, including the new general purpose technologies in the nexus of big data and artificial intelligence. The perceived success of the Bretton Woods architecture in enabling postwar reconstruction has prompted calls for a "new Bretton Woods" to address these contemporary challenges. This paper critically examines the original Bretton Woods framework as conceived by its architects, reviews the extent to which it was actually implemented, the extent to which it worked as planned, and the extent to which it delivered on the aims of its architects. It argues that the benefits realized during the Bretton Woods era were largely products of economic and political circumstances that could not be replicated today--and moreover that the Bretton Woods framework cannot be credited with delivering globalization or faulted for its perceived failings. Further, the paper contends that current geopolitical and economic conditions more closely resemble those which motivated the unsuccessful 1933 London Monetary and Economic Conference and suggests that efforts should be turned to redoing London and attempting to improve upon it rather than trying to return to Bretton Woods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]