What is the difference between the IMF and World Bank? What is the WTO? I always get these things mixed up.?

Question

It seems like these three things are used interchangeably...I know in general what they do, but I don't know how to distinguish them.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund in particular are hard for me to distinguish.

What is the difference between these entities?

Answer 1

= Both the IMF and World Bank were created in the aftermath of WWII to help stablize world finance. It would be easy to confuse them. IMF is concerned with the whole world, while the World Bank is focused on developing countries.

= The World Trade Organization (WTO) was only created in 1995.

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The International Monetary Fund was created with a goal to stabilize exchange rates and supervise the reconstruction of the world's international payment system. Countries contributed to a pool which could be borrowed from, on a temporary basis, by countries with payment imbalances.

   The IMF describes itself as "an organization of 185 countries working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty".

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World Bank  is an internationally supported bank that provides financial and technical assistance to developing countries for development programs (e.g. bridges, roads, schools, etc.) with the stated goal of reducing poverty.

The World Trade Organization (WTO), (OMC - French: Organisation mondiale du commerce, Spanish: Organización Mundial del Comercio), is an international organization designed to supervise and liberalize international trade. The WTO came into being on January 1, 1995, and is the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was created in 1947, and continued to operate for almost five decades as a de facto international organization.

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The World Trade Organization deals with the rules of trade between nations at a near-global level; it is responsible for negotiating and implementing new trade agreements, and is in charge of policing member countries' adherence to all the WTO agreements, signed by the bulk of the world's trading nations and ratified in their parliaments. Most of the WTO's current work comes from the 1986-94 negotiations called the Uruguay Round, and earlier negotiations under the GATT. The organization is currently the host to new negotiations, under the Doha Development Agenda (DDA) launched in 2001

The WTO is governed by a Ministerial Conference, which meets every two years; a General Council, which implements the conference's policy decisions and is responsible for day-to-day administration; and a director-general, who is appointed by the Ministerial Conference. The WTO's headquarters is in Geneva, Switzerland