The role of international economic organizations as regulators of the world economy and agents of globalization

Abstract

The international organizations created in Bretton Woods, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank, in 1944, which were joined years later, in 1947, by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), have constituted the triad that have regulated economic relations between countries of the capitalist world. The international regulation that began to operate in the postwar period was a novelty, since in the past there had not been any type of organization of these characteristics.
The role of these institutions has changed over time because of changes in the global economy. Two stages can be distinguished: the first that goes from the end of the Second World War until the seventies, and the second between the seventies and the present. Although in this second phase there have been changes of great importance that led to a subdivision. The most relevant changes have been the fall of real socialism, and the emergence of China as a great world economic power, which modify the geopolitical and economic map.
It is, therefore, a question of analysing this new phase – marked in turn by the Great Recession and the pandemic – and the role played by the triad, as drivers of globalization, sustained by neoliberal thinking and hegemonized by finance, as well as in the changes that are taking place, especially in the new forms of imperialism that are emerging.