Convergence and Divergence of National Financial Systems: Evidence from the Gold Standards, 1871-1971

Although they have a very long history, academic studies of financial structures have developed in three general steps apparently sound assumptions during the last fi fty years or so.
The first step came after World War I and in the wake of the Great Depres-sion, as a sustained eff ort to establish reliable data series, while new theories were being put forward, to explain the collapse of the gold standard, as well as the eco-nomic gyrations that followed World War I. Th us motivated, states and central banks tried to institute new institutional designs, as during the so-called great conferences of Genoa (1922), London (1933) or Bretton Woods (1944). Th is set the stage for an international drive towards more comprehensive, reliable and comparable statistics covering monetary and financial matters. At the same time, central banks all over the developed world engaged into more academic-like research, leading to a serious upheaval of both the quantity and quality of their published material, even on a retrospective basis. But whether the institutions were ill-designed or the goal of a Gold-standard built-in balancing mechanism was an illusion, these conferences were mostly in vain, failing to design stable and enduring international monetary and financial systems. At best they ended up with a temporary alleviation of the main problems but succeeded in creating multilateral institutions whose usefulness would prove to be well beyond the scope of their original charters, such as the BIS, the World Bank or the IMF.