ABSTRACT
Economists tend to regard globalization, implying ever more open markets, as a positive development per se. They see the promise of a stronger role for the forces of competition, and the more effective channeling of human and other resources into those activities where productivity is greatest. By way of contrast, they take a skeptical view of regionalization, with its implied geographical segmentation of markets, suspecting that such groupings intend to hold up the welfare-enhancing globalization process in favor of particularized interests. If this admittedly rather coarse distinction between globalization and regionalization holds true, the international trade and monetary policy agreements concluded fifty years ago in Bretton Woods surely deserve the highest merit. The historical circumstances of the Second World War (still in progress at the time), the experience of the competitive devaluations of the interwar years, which had shaken the world economy to its foundations, and the fact that world policy structures were still malleable, apart from the USA's unqualified position of supremacy (also excluding the Soviet sphere of influence then developing, which was to remain on the outside until 1989): all of these factors made it easier for the politicians of the day to commit themselves on such an extensive scale to a surrender of sovereignty to global institutions.
