The Bretton Woods Agreement created the IMF and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, now part of the World Bank Group, in 1944.
Delegates from 44 Allied countries met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in July 1944. They designed institutions intended to support monetary stability, reconstruction, and international economic cooperation after World War II. The International Monetary Fund was created to assist with balance-of-payments problems, while the World Bank’s original role focused on reconstruction and development.
The Bretton Woods monetary system linked currencies to the U.S. dollar, which was convertible into gold for foreign official holders. That exchange-rate structure ended in the early 1970s, but the IMF and World Bank continued operating.
The agreement is sometimes confused with the later Bretton Woods system as a whole. The conference produced the institutional framework and rules; the broader fixed-exchange-rate system evolved afterward and eventually changed substantially.