| | The World Bank, together with its affiliates the International Finance Corporation and the International Development Association, is now the world's single most important source of development funds. Paired with the International Monetary Fund at Bretton Woods in 1944, the Bank was conceived as one of a number of new international institutions that would revive the world capitalist economy after the disruption of the crisis of the 1930s and the Second World War and open up the European colonial empires to American capital. The seriousness of the crisis, the destruction brought by the war, and the growing influence of Keynes' ideas led to a re-examination of international economic relations. Much of Europe would have to be rebuilt, but it was not a simple question of physical reconstruction. A general economic reorganisation resting on the American belief in the Open Door was needed to provide the means for extended development. The Bank and the IMF were to attempt to fill this role. |
