Could International Policy Co-Ordination have been More Effective?

The 1960s have sometimes been idolized as the Golden Age of international policy co-ordination. In the first section of this paper I describe the two mechanisms that produced some sort of coordination of macro policies of the major industrial countries at that time. In the second section I note that the policy regime increasingly failed to deliver the desired results, and ultimately collapsed. Alternative possible explanations for these failures are then discussed.