Robert Wade: Showdown at the World Bank. New Left Review 7, January-February 2001 ‘International financial institutions’ are more national than they seem.
Robert Wade reveals how tightly the US Treasury monitors and controls the World Bank, and how quickly it will stamp out departures from its orthodoxy. In April 2000, as anti-globalization protesters prepared to descend on Washington, the World Bank’s former chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz, published an article in the New Republic which began: Next week’s meeting of the International Monetary Fund will bring to Washington, DC many of the same demonstrators who trashed the World Trade Organization in Seattle last fall. They’ll say the IMF is arrogant. Stiglitz went on to detail his criticisms of the IMF’s handling of the 1997–98 East Asian crisis. As the World Bank’s chief economist, Stiglitz began lobbying for change. Stiglitz had no doubts as to where these policies were coming from.
Doctrine of enlargement Wolfensohn’s price The ‘business’ of empowerment. Poverty, Corruption and the Changing World - Rober Wade. Robert H.
Wade On May 29 2013 James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005, gave the Amartya Sen lecture at the London School of Economics, on the subject, “Reflections on a changing world, 1950-2050”. His reflections on the changing world were mainly reflections on what he achieved as World Bank president. He emphasised five. Here I comment on the first two: poverty reduction as the central goal of development, and corruption as an explicitly stated problem. Poverty reduction and inequality Wolfensohn’s elevation of poverty reduction as the central goal echoes then World Bank president Robert McNamara in 1973, forty years ago, who solemnly proposed in a speech in Nairobi, Kenya, a “new strategy”. But McNamara showed awareness of a closely related issue that remained eclipsed in the Wolfensohn era: income and related inequalities.
Why this asymmetry of attention? Corruption On corruption, I begin with my own engagement with the Bank. "Whose World Bank?" by Joseph E. Stiglitz. Exit from comment view mode. Click to hide this space Comments View/Create comment on this paragraph NEW YORK – US President Barack Obama’s nomination of Jim Yong Kim for the presidency of the World Bank has been well received – and rightly so, especially given some of the other names that were bandied about. In Kim, a public-health professor who is now President of Dartmouth College and previously led the World Health Organization’s HIV/AIDS department, the United States has put forward a good candidate.
But the candidate’s nationality, and the nominating country – whether small and poor or large and rich – should play no role in determining who gets the job. Comments View/Create comment on this paragraph The World Bank’s 11 executive directors from emerging and developing countries have put forward two excellent candidates, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala of Nigeria and Jose Antonio Ocampo of Colombia.
Comments View/Create comment on this paragraph Much is at stake. World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data. World Bank Group. The World Bank. The World Bank. Jeffrey Sachs’ Reform Candidacy for World Bank President Offers Chance to Fix the Bank.
As Sachs noted last week, “US officials have traditionally viewed the World Bank as an extension of United States foreign policy and commercial interests. . . . .
Many projects have catered to US corporate interests rather than to sustainable development . ..” from Mark weisbrot The World Bank now has its first contested race for the President of the institution in 68 years. Economist Jeffrey Sachs has thrown his hat into the ring, and as of this week has been officially nominated by the governments of Kenya, Malaysia, Jordan, and East Timor. This is good news for the World Bank and the world, since the Bank has considerable influence in developing countries, especially poor ones, and is badly in need of reform.
Sachs is facing an uphill battle: this is an election year, and some of the corporations who make millions off the Bank are also contributors to U.S. political campaigns. But it was also a battle that should have never occurred. See article on original website.