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On April 13, 1966, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Pierre-Paul Schweitzer, announced to the Fund's Executive Board that he was awarding Jacques J. Polak the title of The Economic Counsellor. This title would be additional to the one that he already had held since 1958, that of Director of the Department of Research and Statistics. The new title had not existed before, and it was the only way that Schweitzer could recognize that Polak stood above the other department directors in his importance to--and esteem in--the IMF.1
Fast forward to April 2004, when the IMF decided to help Jacques Polak celebrate his 90th birthday by renaming its annual research conference in his honor. The linkage was not just a response to his many years of service and his well-known publications in international finance and economic policy. It was also a recognition of his continuing contributions to the institution and to the international financial system. Polak still maintained an office on the top floor at IMF headquarters where he worked steadily on a succession of studies, both on his own and in partnership with younger colleagues.
What did Jacques Polak contribute to our understanding of the world economy and to the way that the international financial system evolved? Because the record accumulated over some seven decades and because much of it was accomplished behind the scenes and through teamwork with IMF colleagues, the answer is not easy to discern, nor without controversy.
I. Who Was Jacques Polak, and What Did He Do?
When Jacques Polak was named The Economic Counsellor in 1966, he was approaching his 52nd birthday, having been born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, on April 25, 1914. He had already spent nearly two decades on the staff of the IMF and nearly three decades as a working economist. His professional life began in 1937, when he received his doctorate in economics from the University of Amsterdam. The great Dutch econometrician Jan Tinbergen--who would later become a co-winner of the inaugural Nobel prize in economic sciences--was then on a two-year leave from academics to work at the economics section of the League of Nations in Geneva. Polak joined him there as his assistant, and the two men shared an office for...