The Economic and Financial Organization (EFO, ) was the largest of the technical arms of the League of Nations, and the world's first international organization dedicated to promoting economic and monetary co-operation. It took shape in the early 1920s and was in activity until the creation of the United Nations in 1945. It has been described as having had seminal influence on postwar economic institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
Background
The establishment of the EFO took place in the aftermath of unprecedented transnational cooperation initiatives among allied powers during World War I, which were also pioneering experiments in planned economy imposed by the circumstances. These included the Wheat Executive established in late 1916, and the Allied Maritime Transport Council established in late 1917. They had brought together enterprising civil servants such as Italy's Bernardo Attolico, France's Jean Monnet, and Britain's Arthur Salter, who would play key roles in the war's aftermath. In February 1919, the Paris Peace Conference established a Supreme Economic Council to manage the postwar economic emergencies, but that was soon undermined by a growing division of views between France and Italy on one side, advocating a continuation of the wartime joint action, and the UK and U.S. on the other side, preferring a rapid return to market-oriented business as usual.
In late 1919, Dutch financial community leaders Gerard Vissering and Carel E. ter Meulen organized two conferences in Amsterdam whose participants included economists Gustav Cassel and John Maynard Keynes. On the basis of their conclusions that a collective intergovernmental effort was needed to remedy the postwar disruptions, a petition circulated in January 1920 by the Times in the UK and the New York Times in the U.S. collected 150 signatures of luminaries such as Gustave Ador, Robert Cecil, Arthur Twining Hadley, Herbert Hoover, J. P. Morgan Jr., Fridtjof Nansen, Richard Vassar Vassar-Smith, Paul Warburg, and others including from Denmark and France, an early example of cross-national advocacy. In early February, the British government made it known that it would favor the convening of an international conference by the League of Nations, which had just been formally established in January 1920. The League Council endorsed that proposal during a meeting in London on , setting the scene for the Brussels Conference that would be held in September–October 1920.
Establishment and setup
In 1919, a prefiguration team of the League, located at 117 Piccadilly in London, had started to collect and publish economic statistics, which remained the initial focus of the Economic and Financial Section that was soon established within the League Secretariat, and spent much of 1920 preparing the conference. Walter Layton led that fledgling team and moved with it to Geneva in the course of 1920. Per Jacobsson joined the staff in April 1920. In 1922, Salter took over from Layton's acting successor Frank H. Nixon, and led the EFO until 1931, expanding its staff from seventeen to sixty during that period. By then, it was significantly larger than any other section of the League Secretariat.
Following a recommendation of the Brussels Conference, the League's inaugural Assembly meeting in November 1920 endorsed the expansion of the scope into an organization that would be able to formulate policy recommendations to member (and non-member) states, despite initial misgivings from the United Kingdom. On that basis, the League established a Joint Provisional Economic and Financial Committee () composed of experts nominated by the League's Council, and thus not officially representing their respective governments. After that, the EFO's work agenda was determined by the Second Committee of the League's Assembly, which dealt with all so-called technical issues (under the formal authority of the League's Council) and met once every year in September.