Summary of ’The Bretton Woods Twins and Structural Adjustment in the Era of Neoliberal Globalization’ conference

The event brought together 18 scholars from Africa, Europe, and the United States to discuss a topic that is highly controversial, namely, structural adjustment programs (SAPs) that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) implemented towards developing and socialist countries from the 1970s until the 1990s. The conference addressed the agency of these programs, whether they were truly “imposed” by the Bretton Woods Twins or instead carried out nationally and independently from what these financial institutions demanded. 

Importantly, papers presented at the conference also reflected on the economic consequences created by SAPs, namely, whether they helped poor countries to adjust their negative balance of payments and macroeconomic conditions. 

Participants agreed that the legacy of these programs, like their agency, is mixed: in some countries SAPs helped countries fixing their imbalances, in others they aggravated social tensions and poverty. These findings recast some of the orthodox narrative that has characterized the role the Bretton Woods Twins played during the advent of “neoliberal globalization,” opening new venues for future research on a crucial topic for the history of political economy and global capitalism.  

The conference has been organized by Federico Pachetti (Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary) Jonas Kreienbaum (Freie Universität Berlin, Germany) and Eva-Maria Muschik (Universität Wien, Austria).