The production of an export surplus was therefore intimately connected with establishing a world economy that was free of imperial systems, as well as bilateral payments and trading systems.

Here, too, early post-World War II experience may provide a solution: the European Payments Union, established under American leadership in 1950, cut through a tangle of bilateral payments arrangements between war-ravaged countries.

In 1950, together with Hubert Ansiaux, he was involved in setting up the European Payments Union with the aim of replacing bilateral payments with a system of multilateral trade and payments.