In this book, Jacques J. Polak describes and analyzes the relationship between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 to the present. In their first three decades, the two institutions engaged in clearly distinct activities: the Bank made long-term loans to finance infrastructural projects in developing countries, while the Fund gave economic advice and short-term stabilization loans to both industrial and developing countries. But since the mid-1970s, the separate lives of the two "Bretton Woods Sisters" have become increasingly...