In this book, Jacques J. Polak describes and analyzes the relationship between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund since the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. He explains that 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 demarcation lines between the institutions have often become blurred.

Polak focuses primarily on the period since the mid-1970s, in which both the Fund and the Bank have tried to meet many countries' pressing needs for macroeconomic stabilization and structural adjustment. He examines the conflicts between the institutions arising from their overlapping activities and culminating at the end of the 1980s, and he describes the measures taken since then to diffuse these conflicts.