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During the 1960s-1970s, in at least most of its statistics, why did the IMF distinguish between "industrial countries" (e.g. the US, Canada, UK, France, W. Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, and Japan) on the one hand, and first "other high-income countries" and then "primary producing countries in more developed areas" (e.g. Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Finland) on the other hand? In other words, for what purposes did the IMF even bother, at the time, to divide the developed countries into those in which exports of manufactured goods are important and those in which primary goods still account for most exports and/or have been less-developed in the relatively recent past?
(To illustrate how arbitrary such a thing can be, Canada and Australia are similar countries in quite a lot of respects, and yet they were classified differently by the IMF in those days.)
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