The Baker Plan was launched in October 1985 at the

International Monetary Fund The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a major financial agency of the United Nations, and an international financial institution, headquartered in Washington, D.C., consisting of 190 countries. Its stated mission is "working to foster glo ...

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Inte ...

meeting in

Seoul Seoul (; ; ), officially known as the Seoul Special City, is the capital and largest metropolis of South Korea.Before 1972, Seoul was the ''de jure'' capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) as stated iArticle 103 of ...

, by

James Baker James Addison Baker III (born April 28, 1930) is an American attorney, diplomat and statesman. A member of the Republican Party, he served as the 10th White House Chief of Staff and 67th United States Secretary of the Treasury under President ...

United States Secretary of the Treasury The United States secretary of the treasury is the head of the United States Department of the Treasury, and is the chief financial officer of the federal government of the United States. The secretary of the treasury serves as the principal a ...

, as a way to combat the international debt crisis. It was inspired by the idea that China's trade surplus could be used to relieve some of the Third World's problems with debt. The Plan was designed to help highly indebted middle-income countries, i.e., those countries that are not incredibly poor but nevertheless owe a large amount of money. Fifteen countries were mentioned, and ten of those were in Central and

Latin America Latin America or * french: Amérique Latine, link=no * ht, Amerik Latin, link=no * pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived f ...

. The Baker Plan was succeeded by the

Brady Plan Brady bonds are dollar-denominated bonds, issued mostly by Latin American countries in the late 1980s. The bonds were named after U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady, who proposed a novel debt-reduction agreement for developing countries. ...

References

*Buiter, W. and Srinivasan, T.N. (1987) "Rewarding the Profligate and Punishing the Prudent and Poor: Some Recent Proposals for Debt Relief", ''World Development Journal'', Vol. 15, No. 3, pp411–417. *Bogdanowicz-Bindert, C A, (1986) "The Debt Crisis: The Baker Plan Revisited", ''Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs'', Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 33–45. *Rudolph, Barbara,
Enter The Brady Plan
, ''Time'', 20 March 1989. *Riding, Alan,

''New York Times'', December 16, 1985. Economic history of the United States History of the foreign relations of the United States 1985 in international relations {{econ-policy-stub