– Mount Washington Hotel situated in Bretton Woods, US. This is the place where the famous conference was held. These decades also saw the worldwide spread of technology and enterprise. Developing countries were in a hurry to catch up with the advanced industrial countries.
Therefore, they invested vast amounts of capital, importing industrial plant and equipment featuring modern technology. . Decolonisation and Independence When the Second World War ended, large parts of the world were still under European colonial rule. Over the next two decades most colonies in Asia and Africa emerged as free, independent nations.
They were, however, overburdened by poverty and a lack of resources, and their economies and societies were handicapped by long periods of colonial rule. The IMF and the World Bank were designed to meet the financial needs of the industrial countries. They were not equipped to cope with the challenge of poverty and lack of development in the former colonies. But as Europe and Japan rapidly rebuilt their economies, they grew less dependent on the IMF and the World Bank.
Thus from the late 1950s the Bretton Woods institutions began to shift their attention more towards developing countries. As colonies, many of the less developed regions of the world had been part of Western empires. Now, ironically, as newly independent countries facing urgent pressures to lift their populations out of poverty, they came under the guidance of international agencies dominated by the former colonial powers. Even after many years of decolonisation, the former colonial powers still controlled vital resources such as minerals and land in many of their former colonies.
Large corporations of other powerful countries, for example the US, also often managed to secure rights to exploit developing countries’ natural resources very cheaply. At the same time, most developing countries did not benefit from the fast growth the Western economies experienced in the 1950s and 1960s. Therefore they organised themselves as a group – the Group of (or G- ) – to demand a new international economic order (NIEO). By the NIEO they meant a system that would give them real