The United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held at Bretton Woods sixty years ago led to the establishment of the IMF and World Bank. This was a foundational moment. As the most powerful financial institutions of our times were created, hopes ran high of a better world, in which international cooperation through the IMF would sustain economic activity and prevent the adoption of measures destructive of national and international prosperity. The Bank was to assist reconstruction of war ravaged countries and finance the development of the less developed world. For a number of decades, the institutions created in Bretton Woods and the system based on them seemed to work well.

Today, the Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs) play a diminished role and suffer from a loss of legitimacy and credibility. Several factors account for this diminished role. Among them the expansion of financial markets, the rapid growth of emerging market economies and the rigidity of a governance structure which reflects the political accommodation reached at the end of World War II; an outcome that has become increasingly obsolete and dysfunctional. The current governance structure of the IMF and World Bank fails to take into account the fact that today, the developing countries and economies in transition account for half of the world's output in real terms, for most of the world's population, encompass the most dynamic economies and hold about two-thirds of all international reserves.