The World Bank and International Monetary Fund

The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are separate institutions with different mandates, different balance sheets, and different instruments, but they share a common origin and a common headquarters city. Both were created at the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference held at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, from July 1 to July 22, 1944, and both are based in Washington, D.C. They are often referred to collectively as the Bretton Woods Institutions.

The International Monetary Fund is charged with safeguarding the stability of the international monetary system. It provides short-term and medium-term lending to countries experiencing balance-of-payments difficulties, conducts surveillance of the global and national economies, and offers technical assistance on macroeconomic and financial-sector policy. As of 2026, the IMF has 190 member countries, represented on its Executive Board through constituencies weighted by economic size.

The World Bank Group is a development finance institution focused on long-term poverty reduction, infrastructure, human capital, and private-sector growth. It is made up of five legally distinct but operationally integrated organizations that lend to governments, invest in private companies, insure cross-border investors against political risk, and arbitrate investor-state disputes. The Bank has 189 member countries and its core lending arms disburse tens of billions of dollars annually across nearly every developing region.

The two institutions have evolved considerably since their founding. The IMF, initially designed to police a system of fixed exchange rates pegged to the United States dollar, reinvented itself after the collapse of that system in the early 1970s, becoming a crisis lender and policy advisor to developing and emerging-market economies. The Bank, first a reconstruction lender for war-torn Europe, shifted in the 1950s and 1960s toward project lending in developing countries, and later toward policy-based lending, programmatic support, and a growing focus on global public goods such as climate finance and pandemic preparedness.