ABSTRACT
If there is one thing more than any other which illustrates the proposition that reconstruction after 1945 was not reconstruction from the aftermath of the Second World War alone but from the problems left by the failure of reconstruction after 1918, it is the concentration of international effort on rebuilding a method of conducting international trade and payments which, for the developed economies at least, would function as easily and successfully as the one which had existed before 1914. Before 1914 the assumption that international trade and exchanges would continue to expand had been almost universal. Yet there had been only a brief period in the 1920s in Europe when this had been so. The expansion that took place then scarcely regained the volume lost between 1914 and 1924, and in the 1930s the volume of international trade, investment, and other forms of exchanges remained lower than before 1929 in spite of the fact that many countries, Germany most notably, greatly increased their national output and income.
