[1] 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.

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.

[3] 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.

The organisational setup of the EFO, like that of the League of Nations in general, was deliberately obscure as the related opacity of decision-forming was viewed as helpful to manage the sensitive matters of economic and financial diplomacy.

In the first three, the EFO was broadly successful at cementing an international policy consensus on the underpinnings of financial stability, including sound fiscal management and independent central banks, even though it made less headway towards restrictions on cartels and trade protection.

One flaw of the EFO doctrine, however, was insufficient insistence on banking supervision, in part a reflection of the fact that the United States, which had the most advanced supervisory practices of the time, was not a member of the League.

[11]: 22  Partly for that reason, the European banking crisis of 1931 shattered the 1920s orthodoxy, leading to the complete failure of the London Conference in June 1933 after which the League made no further similar attempts.

[1]: 14-15  Monnet had the intuition that the respective British, French, Czechoslovak and Italian interests could be leveraged into a cooperative plan, and had it conceived during a lakeside gathering with Salter and Basil Blackett.

The appointment of the Commissioner-General by the League itself, as opposed to a business person representing the private creditors, was a major innovation which Monnet defended as key to ensure political acceptance.

In December 1922, the Austrian government unilaterally decided to appoint local banker Richard Reisch [de] as governor of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, which was promptly established in January 1923.

This conflict delayed the loan's issuance until a compromise was found in the spring of 1923, under which the League would appoint an "adviser" with extensive oversight powers over the central bank's decisions.

First, the external loan account held money provided by the foreign creditors for use by the borrowing government to cover fiscal deficits during the initial phase of transition.

[2]: 491  Throughout the 1930s, the EFO displayed intellectual honesty and flexibility by abandoning some of its prior gold standard orthodoxy and advocating policies directed at full employment, echoing the contemporaneous theoretical work of John Maynard Keynes and the Stockholm School of Economics.

The agreement’s text repeated much of prior EFO reports' language, and facilitated the simultaneous French policy pivot towards a more liberal trade stance.

[1]: 29  Other economists who worked at the EFO and would attain later fame, often at the IMF, included Marcus Fleming, Alvin Hansen, Folke Hilgerdt, and Tjalling Koopmans.

The Institute's director Frank Aydelotte persuaded the U.S. Department of State about the move, deftly invoking the memory of Woodrow Wilson and his associations with both Princeton and the League, and secured funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

[1]: 33  In the assessment of Louis Pauly, "The final economic studies of the League contributed to a new consensus that ultimately found its authoritative expression in the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement and in the 1947 Havana Charter".

In a monograph published shortly afterwards, William Martin Hill, who had joined the EFO staff in 1927,[34] noted that "Consultation between officials engaged in framing and executing economic and social policies in different countries was rare before 1914; through the League it became an established practice".

[35]: 3–4  The memory of the EFO and its partial successes was then somewhat obscured during the Cold War period by the incentives to emphasize the League's institutional limitations in contrast with the more robust western postwar order, including by Salter himself in his memoirs published in 1961.

He argues that both institutions pivoted towards analytical work following the respective setbacks, but also that the memory of the ultimate failure of the League helped the IMF find a new mandate in the 1980s when it played a central role in addressing the Latin American debt crisis.

[1]: 39-40  He also notes that neither the League nor the IMF were allowed to intervene directly in situations deemed too critically sensitive by their most powerful stakeholders, such as the German reparations which were (mis)handled in a separate series of international conferences in which the EFO had little or no influence.

[1]: 38 More recent scholarship, not least by historian Patricia Clavin, has emphasized the EFO's pioneering initiatives, its policy achievements including during the 1930s, and its role in fostering an epistemic community that would be critically influential in post-World War II developments.