The Missing Bretton Woods Debate over Flexible Exchange Rates

Douglas Irwin

No 23037, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: The collapse of the gold standard in the 1930s sparked a debate about the merits of fixed versus floating exchange rates. Yet the debate quickly vanished: there was almost no discussion about the exchange rate regime at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 because John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dexter White agreed that exchange rate stability through fixed but adjustable pegs was the right approach. In light of the difficult macroeconomic tradeoffs experienced under the gold standard a decade earlier, the outright rejection of floating exchange rates seems surprising. This paper explores the views of leading economists about the exchange rate provisions in the Bretton Woods agreement and examines why arguments for floating exchange rates were so quickly dismissed.

JEL-codes: B22 F31 F33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cba, nep-his, nep-hpe, nep-mon, nep-opm and nep-pke
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