IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/frochp/978-3-030-78491-1_5.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Bretton Woods System

In: Building Trust in the International Monetary System

Author

Listed:
  • Giovanni Battista Pittaluga

    (University of Genoa)

  • Elena Seghezza

    (University of Genoa)

Abstract

As the end of World War II approached, the Allies, and in particular the USA, were determined to create a new international monetary order. Many believed that, in the 1930s, the worldwide transmission of deflation and the frequent recourse by countries to competitive devaluations had contributed to the Great Depression. The goal of the USA and Great Britain was to develop a new international monetary system. The crucial aspect of the system, based on the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944, lies in the fact that, for the first time, it was an attempt at a “legalization” of international monetary affairs: a set of rules and institutions, shared and accepted by a large number of countries, that aimed at ensuring the functioning of an international payment system. This made it possible to introduce, at the international level, innovative payment systems based, rather than on commodity money, as in the gold standard, on a fiat money, the dollar. Over time, the changing dynamics of inflation and productivity made the Bretton Woods system less attractive to the advanced countries, in particular the USA. On August 15, 1971 President Nixon suspended the convertibility of the dollar and the Bretton Woods system ended.

Suggested Citation

  • Giovanni Battista Pittaluga & Elena Seghezza, 2021. "The Bretton Woods System," Frontiers in Economic History, in: Building Trust in the International Monetary System, chapter 0, pages 119-168, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:frochp:978-3-030-78491-1_5
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-78491-1_5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:frochp:978-3-030-78491-1_5. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.