Bretton Woods gains support

Press, 26 October 1982, Page 2

Bretton Woods gains support

NZPA Tokyo Mr Muldoon's call for a new Bretton Woods conference on international financial and trade institutions was soundly supported at the close of the fourth NorthSouth round-table meeting in Tokyo. Such a conference should be held in 1983 or “certainly before the end of 1984,” said the chairman of the informal forum of leaders of developing and advanced countries and international bodies, Mahbub ul-Haq of Pakistan.

Efforts to revitalise the depressed world economy and narrow the gap between rich and poor nations had been frustrated by failure to question the efficiency of the

International Monetary Fund (1.M.F.), the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (G.A.T.T.), and the World Bank, he said. “We need to fashion new structures and institutions in line with new realities,” he said after the meeting. Existing institutions were agreed on at Bretton Woods in the wake of World War II by only a handful of nations, he said. Some of the ideas raised during the meeting included the creation of a world central bank, merging the I.M.F. and the World Bank into a single institution, and replacing the United States dollar with a genuine international currency, Mr ul-Haq said.