ABSTRACT
There is a widely held assumption among social scientists that economics has had the strongest impact of any social science on the evolution of government policy thanks to “the elegant simplicity of its behavioural assumptions and from the possibilities of deductive reasoning and [the] formal analysis associated with them.”2 The time has come to interrogate this supposition more widely.3
Historians and economists have devoted considerable attention to the making of economic policy, charting, in particular, the adoption and application of Keynesian and later non-Keynesian economic policies in the dominant western economies in the years after 1945.4 But when it comes to the interwar period much remains to be done. While there has been some research into the contributions made by particular institutions and individuals to the development of economic policy, the attempt to draw the impact of economic advisors across national and institutional boundaries remains at an early stage.5 Little attention also has been paid to the construction and application of policy advice in an international context. The majority of published work has focused on the rise and fall of central bank cooperation and its determining role in defining the character and success of Europe’s economic and monetary reconstruction after the First World War.6 This focus on the character and quality of central bank cooperation has caused us to neglect other aspects of informal cooperation like the exchange of ideas and personnel across national and institutional frontiers, which also shaped international financial cooperation.
