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Transgovernmental Interaction in the International Monetary System, 1960–1972

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Robert W. Russell
Robert W. Russell
Affiliation:
Robert W. Russell is a member of the Department of Political Science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois.
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The main hypothesis of this article is that transgovernmental interaction among central banks and finance ministries of industrialized countries was as significant in economic policy formation as intergovernmental interaction. Elite interview data indicate, however, that the international consultative process among deputy central bank governors and deputy finance ministers conformed more closely to the intergovernmental image of international politics than had been expected. Both interaction patterns within the deputies’ consultative group and the impact of international consultations upon national economic policies could be explained moderately well in terms of a unified rational actor model. Examination of the transgovernmental interaction does suggest ways to systematically modify and improve interpretations based upon the rational actor model. In addition, the degree of politicization of issues may prove to be a reliable guide when deciding whether the transgovernmental dimension of an issue requires detailed study.

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Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1973 , pp. 431 - 464
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1973

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References

1 For a discussion of possible reasons for the politicization of international economic relations and the emergence of crises, see Morse, Edward L., “Crisis Diplomacy, Interdependence, and the Politics of International Economic Relations,” in Tanter, Raymond and Ullman, Richard H. (eds.), Theory and Policy in International Relations (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1972).Google Scholar The book was also issued separately as a supplement to World Politics, 1972 (Vol. 24).Google Scholar

2 Cohen, Stephen D., International Monetary Reform, 1964–1969: The Political Dimension (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970).Google Scholar

3 These points are further developed by Hoffmann, Stanley, “Weighing the Balance of Power,” Foreign Affairs, 07 1972 (Vol. 50, No. 4), pp. 618–643, especially pp. 631–636.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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12 Actual titles vary from country to country. Some examples are:

USA — Under–Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs; Governor, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

UK — Second Permanent Secretary, Her Majesty's Treasury; Executive Director, Bank of England

Germany — Ministerialdirektor, Bundesministerium fur Wirtschaft; Vizeprasidentder Deutschen Bundesbank

France — Directeur du Trésor, ministère de l’économie et des finances; Premier sous–gouverneur de la Banque de France

13 Similar conclusions were reached by Tew, Brian, the University of Nottingham, in “The International Monetary Fund,” unpublished manuscript, 1970, pp. 96–110,Google Scholar and Strange, Susan, “IMF: Monetary Managers,” in Cox, Robert W. and Jacobson, Harold K. (eds.), The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in International Organization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 263–297.Google Scholar

1 The Group of Ten (eleven countries when Switzerland is counted) includes the signatories to the General Arrangements to Borrow (GAB). The GAB was formally proposed by M. Baumgartner, minister of finance from France, in a letter of December 15, 1961. The GAB was approved by IMF Board Decision No. 1289–(62/1) of January 5, 1962 (subsequently amended), and came into operation on October 24, 1962. The GAB was first activated in November 1964 for the benefit of the United Kingdom. Switzerland became associated with the GAB and, thus, the Group of Ten, by letter of June 11, 1964. See Horsefield, J. Keith (ed.), The International Monetary Fund, 1945–1965: Twenty Years of International Monetary Cooperation (3 Vols, Washington, D.C.: International Monetary Fund, 1969), Vol. 3, pp. 254–255.Google Scholar

2 Working Party Number Three of the Economic Policy Committee of the OECD was instituted in 1961 for the purpose of “the promotion of better international payments equilibrium.” The first meeting of WP3 was held April 20, 1961, in Paris. Belgium attends WP3 meetings regularly as part of the Netherlands delegation and takes an active part in the sessions. Japan joined OECD and WP3 in 1964.

3 Membership in the Bank for International Settlements is held by central banks, not by national governments. The United States subscription was provided by a banking group headed by the First National City Bank of New York. The United States has sent official observers, generally from the Federal Reserve System, since 1960. Canada and Japan, which have sent official observers since 1964, became members of the BIS in 1970.

4 The Basle Group, established in October 1968, “undertook to provide foreign currencies, to be drawn by the United Kingdom from the Bank for International Settlements, to finance reductions in the sterling holdings of the overseas sterling area countries below certain levels. This undertaking applied both to official and to private sterling holders. Sterling area countries were invited to deposit a proportion of their nonsterling reserves with the Bank for International Settlements, to be used in the first place to finance such reductions; but the ‘Basle Group’ undertook to meet any ultimate drain for this purpose up to a total of $2 billion.” Horsefield, IMF Vol. 1, p. 610.Google Scholar

5 The Gold Pool was organized in October 1961 to provide official sales of gold when necessary to keep the dollar price of gold on the London gold market at $35 an ounce. Acting subsequently as both a buying and selling consortium, the Gold Pool continued to intervene in the London gold market until dissolved on March 18, 1968. France discontinued participation in the Gold Pool in June 1967.

6 The Monetary Committee is provided for by Article 105 (2) of the Rome Treaty establishing the European Economic Community, and is charged to foster monetary cooperation and mutual assistance to member states in balance of payments difficulties. The following additional committees have been established with the same country membership: Short–term Economic Policy Committee (February 1960), Medium–term Economic Policy Committee (April 1964), Committee of Central Bank Governors (May 1964), Budget Policy Committee (May 1964). The finance ministers of the EEC also meet together at least three times per year. The candidate members of the EEC—United Kingdom, Denmark, Norway, and Ireland—began sending representatives to Monetary Committee meetings early in 1972. Norway ceased participation after defeat of a national referendum on joining the EEC.

7 Only those countries are checked which were continuously represented throughout the period from 1960 to 1972 by an executive director who was a national of that same country. Italy became eligible in 1968, and Japan became eligible in 1970, to appoint executive directors; they had previously elected their own nationals to those positions. Switzerland is not a member of the IMF.

14 Cooper, Richard N., The Economics of Interdependence: Economic Policy in the Atlantic Community (New York: McGraw–Hill Book Company, 1968).Google Scholar

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17 Tew, pp. 59–60.

18 Cox and Jacobson, The Anatomy of Influence.

19 Galtung, Johan, “Small Group Theory and the Theory of International Relations,” in Kaplan, Morton A. (ed.), New Approaches to International Relations (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1968), pp. 270–302, at p. 274.Google Scholar

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1 Semi–structured interviews were held with 81 of the interviewees during the summer of 1972. Similar questions were asked of fifteen additional interviewees on various occasions in 1969, 1971, and 1972. Twenty–eight of those interviewed represented central banks and 29 represented finance ministers.

2 Of the twenty persons who represented the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands between January 1964 and January 1972, fifteen were interviewed. These fifteen men served 88 percent of the total time served by all participants from those four countries. In addition, several persons were interviewed who attended the meetings as observers or secretaries.

3 Of the seventeen persons who represented Germany, France, and the Netherlands between January 1, 1961, and December 31, 1971, twelve were interviewed. These twelve men served 84 percent of all the time served by representatives of those three countries on the Monetary Committee. Also, several persons were either alternates on the Monetary Committee or Commission members or secretaries to the Committee.

1 . Twenty–four interviewees with personal experience in meetings of G10D and/ or WP3 responded to the leadership question; seventeen of these same interviewees responded to the economic expertise and activeness questions. In all columns in this table in which raw scores appear, the numbers given represent net scores after the occasional negative mentions were subtracted from positive mentions.

2 Twenty–seven representatives received at least one leadership mention by the interviewees. No representative other than those identified (in italics) received more than three mentions. A skewness measure was calculated by the formula: [3(Mean–Median)] / standard deviation. The positive skewness of this distribution is .52, where the upper limit is 3, and the lower limit for negative skewness is —3.

3 The raw scores were weighted in two ways to compensate for biases in the memories of interviewees. First, each individual's raw score was weighted inversely by the proportion of the eleven–year period he had served, in order to increase the scores of those who participated for only a few years. Second, those individuals who served prior to 1964 were given an addition to their raw score to compensate for the fact that only ten of the 24 interviewees had been active in WP3 before 1964. As the weighted scores demonstrate, the individual ranks were not significantly affected by the weighting procedure—only Roosa's rank changed. Nor was there a tendency for central bankers to name central bankers and finance ministry officials to name finance ministry officials. This possibility was tested– resulting in a Yule's Q of –.01. Nor was there a tendency for interviewees to name their own countrymen—only six of the 97 mentions (7 percent) were of that sort.

4 Interviewees could identify leaders by country or by name. The scores represent the net number of interviewees who identified a country or any one of its representatives positively as a “leader.”

5 The raw score on leadership of the highest individual in the first column was subtracted from the total leadership score of the country delegation to form this column.

23 Keohane, Compare Robert O., “Institutionalization in the United Nations General Assembly,” International Organization, Autumn 1969 (Vol. 23, No. 4), pp. 859–896, at p. 892.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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26 The four indicators do not intercorrelate sufficiently to constitute a status scale. Kendall's W is only .600, and it would need to be at least .800 to consider the several indicators a single scale. The Taui correlations for the caucus indicator with the other three indicators are: leadership = .559, expertise = .230, activeness = .479.

1 See German, F. Clifford, “A Tentative Evaluation of World Power,” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 03 1960 (Vol. 4, No. 1), pp. 138–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Cox, Robert W. and Jacobson, Harold K. (eds.), The Anatomy of Influence: Decision Making in International Organization (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 437–443.Google Scholar

2 Organskiz, A. F. K. discusses the use of GNP as an indicator of economic power resources in World Politics (2nd ed.; New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 208–215.Google Scholar Susan Strange states that her combined order “is based upon the position of the member country's economy in respect of trade and monetary considerations. The indices are reserve holdings, reserve or master currency position, overseas investment income, and estimated GDP.” See Cox, and Jacobson, , The Anatomy of Influence, p. 456.Google Scholar

3 Ranked on total inches of space devoted to each country in the Annual Reports of the Bank for International Settlements (33rd through 42nd Reports) in the section on “World Trade and Payments,” except for the following where the section on “Gold, Reserves, and Foreign Exchange” was used: US, UK, Germany, France—1968; US, UK—1967; Japan, Sweden—1962. The total space devoted to the five EEC countries in the annual reports of the Monetary Committee (section on “Individual Situations,” 4th through 13th Reports—omitting the 11th Report) gives identical rankings for those countries.

27 See Schloss, Henry H., “The Bank for International Settlements,” The Bulletin of the New York University Graduate School of Business Administration, Institute of Finance, 09 1970, Nos. 65–66, especially pp. 24–27.Google Scholar

28 Cohen, B. J., Balance of Payments Policy (London: Penguin Books, 1969), pp. 120–121.Google Scholar In the hypothetical case in which all countries could meet their preferred domestic and balance of payments objectives, there would, by definition, be no adjustment costs to be distributed.

29 Allison, , Essence of Decision, p. 3.Google Scholar

30 Allison, , Essence of Decision, pp. 6, 144.Google Scholar

31 Allison, , Essence of Decision, p. 178.Google Scholar

32 Keohane, Robert O. and Nye, Joseph S., “Transnational Systems and International Organization,” unpublished manuscript, 02 1973, p. 19.Google Scholar

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35 Clarke, Stephen V. O., Central Bank Cooperation, 1924–31 (New York: Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 1967).Google Scholar

36 Interview held in June 1972.

37 See paragraphs 8, 35–37 of the Annex Prepared by Deputies to the Ministerial Statement of the Group of Ten, issued August 10, 1964.

38 See Meyer–Zu–Schloctern, F. and Yajima, A., OECD Trade Model: 1970 Version (Paris: OECD, 12 1970),Google Scholar and earlier versions.

39 See the IMF Staff Papers; the OECD Economic Outlook and Occasional Studies; Hansen, Ben, Fiscal Policies in Seven Countries, 1955–1965 (Paris: OECD, 1968);Google Scholar and the report of an expert group chaired by Heller, Walter, Fiscal Policy for a Balanced Economy (Paris: OECD, 1968).Google Scholar

40 The Balance of Payments Adjustment Process (Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 08 1966).Google Scholar

41 See Fellner, William, Machlup, Fritz, and Triffin, Robert (eds.), Maintaining and Restoring Balance in International Payments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

42 The Balance of Payments Adjustment Process, p. 29.

43 Compare findings by Scheinman, p. 764; Molot, pp. 24–28; and Nau, Henry R., “Practice of Interdependence in the Research and Development Sector: Fast Reactor Cooperation in Western Europe,” International Organization, Summer 1972 (Vol. 26, No. 3), pp. 499–526, at p. 521.CrossRefGoogle Scholar