Raphaël Orange-Leroy, 2025-26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar

Traditionally, historians of economics have focused on economists on university faculties, the economists publishing articles in scholarly journals such as the American Economic Review and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. But economists can be found in places other than the academy, and one of the most exciting developments in the history of economics has been the recent work on the activities of economists in government and international organizations such as the IMF.

Raphaël Orange-Leroy’s research is an excellent example of the new direction. A 2025–26 HOPE Center Visiting Scholar, Raphaël is writing about the interactions between the IMF and the Group of 77, a coalition of developing countries acting through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, or UNCTAD. 

His work explores a particular moment, the 1960s and 1970s, when, quite surprisingly, the IMF adapted its policies to the needs and concerns of the countries that made up UNCTAD.

“Before then, the IMF was known mostly for its top-down policies, particularly in Latin America where it tested its disciplinary approaches,” says Raphaël, who completed a PhD in history in 2024 at CY Cergy Paris University.

“And even today, the IMF is probably best known for the Washington Consensus and the austerity measures demanded from Greece in the 2010s.”

But several global events in the 1960s led the IMF to take a more accommodating approach, decolonization being the most important.

“Suddenly there were all these new countries in the General Assembly and the IMF, the old colonies that were now independent nation-states.”

The result was that the IMF adapted its policies to the demands of UNCTAD, shifting from prioritizing domestic monetary stability to, if not prioritizing, at least encouraging economic growth—even if growth meant inflation.

But Raphaël is quick to point out that the adaptation process was not without its difficulties.

“Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like the IMF was a completely new organization overnight. It still largely represented the values of the Global North. The change in the IMF toward developing economies was the result only of some very tough negotiations with UNCTAD.”

When it comes to international organizations and developing countries, Raphaël stresses that ideas matter. 

“Having a conception of the international system as something that can improve developing economies is extremely important,” says Raphaël, who, while a graduate student, spent a semester in Washington, D.C., on a Fulbright. 

“We think that national interests are obvious. But they are not. They have to be articulated in very careful terms, and the way in which politicians and administrators do that is crucial in the long run.”

While at Duke, Raphaël has been visiting archives around the US, including the Truman and Johnson presidential libraries; the Hagley Museum in Wilmington, Delaware, which contains a large collection of papers related to business interests; and the congressional papers in the Jacob Javits Collection at Stony Brook.

Last fall, Raphaël presented a paper on the cooperation between UNCTAD and the IMF that ultimately changed the Fund’s intellectual approach and lending mechanisms between 1963 and 1976.

“When we take a close look at the Fund’s approaches, we can see that they were driven out by a new concern for its developing members.”

Born and raised in Paris, Raphaël has been visiting historic sites in the southeastern region of the country, and has made trips to Charleston and Savannah. “I’ve retraced the Civil War from Fort Sumter to Richmond to Durham,” he says. 

Raphaël plans to consult some of the collections in the Rubenstein Library later this spring, including the papers of Lauchlin Currie, a Canadian-born economist who was an economic adviser to the Colombian government.

He will be at Duke until April.