Visar resultat för..."World Bank"

Who Matters at the World Bank explores "who matters" in a 32-year history (1980-2012) of policy change within the World Bank's public sector management and public sector governance agenda, and is anchored within the public administration discipline and its understanding of bureaucracy, bureaucratic politics, and stakeholder influences. In response to constructivist scholars' concerns about politics and the organizational culture of international civil servants within international organizations, Kim Moloney uses stakeholder theory and a bureaucratic politics approach to suggest the normality of politics, policy debate, and policy evolution. The book also highlights how for 21 of those 32 years it was not external stakeholders but the international civil servants of the World Bank who most influenced, led, developed, and institutionalized this sector's agenda. In so doing, the book explains how one sector of the Bank's work rose, against the odds, from being included in just under 3% of approved projects in 1980 to 73% of all projects approved between 1991 and 2012.

Reviews the transformation of many Latin American economies from 1982 to the present. Devotes particular attention to the recent Mexican currency crisis. During recent years, many Latin American countries have undergone significant reforms. The economic systems that emerged in the 1930s, stifled by heavy government intervention and protectionism, have given way to new ones based on market orientation, openness, and competition. This study provides a thorough analytical review of the events that led to the transformation of these economies during the past decade. The author analyzes economic developments from the debt crisis of 1982 to the stabilization programs of the late 1980s. The evolution of social conditions in the region, including poverty and inequality, is examined in detail. Key topics addressed include the sequencing of reform, the speed of trade liberalization, alternative modes of privatizing state-owned enterprises, the effectiveness of exchange rates as nominal anchors, and the use of emergency social funds as a way of providing a social safety net during the transition.The author concludes with a look at the implications of the recent Mexican currency crisis for the region and an evaluation of Latin America's challenges for the future. Published for the World Bank by Oxford University Press

Providing the poor with access to financial services is one of many ways to help increase their incomes and productivity. In many countries, however, traditional financial institutions have failed to provide this service. Microcredit and co-operative programmes have been developed to fill this gap. Their purpose is to help the poor become self-employed and thus escape poverty. Many of these programmes provide credit using social mechanisms, such as group-based lending, to reach the poor and other clients, including women, who lack access to formal financial institutions. With increasing assistance from the World Bank and other donors, microfinance is emerging as an instrument for reducing poverty and improving the poor's access to financial services in low-income countries. This book examines the experiences of the Grameen Bank and two other major microcredit programmes in Bangladesh in order to quantify the potential and limitations of microcredit programs as an instrument for reducing poverty and delivering financial sevices to the poor.

Vocational education and training (VET) schemes are called on to help unemployed young people and older workers get jobs, to reduce the burden on higher education, to attract foreign investment, to ensure rapid growth of earnings and employment, to reduce inequality of earnings among other aims. These high expectations have resulted in heavy government involvement in VET but the record has been disappointing. This joint World Bank-International Labour Office (ILO) study looks at the experience of 19 countries in reforming their VET policies and summarises the lessons learned.

This updated edition of Confronting AIDS includes a vital, new statistical appendix that assembles information about the levels and determinants of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and selected policy variables for low- and middle-income countries. Confronting AIDS draws on three bodies of knowledge: the epidemiology of HIV; public health insights into disease control; and especially public economics, which focuses on assessing tradeoffs in the allocation of scarce public resources. Confronting AIDS is a strategic document, written to inform and motivate political leaders, policymakers, and development specialists to support the public health community, concerned civil society, and people living with HIV in dealing with this devastating disease.

Thirty-three development economists contribute to this volume, which looks at the future of development economics in relation to thoughts and practice of the past half century. At the core is the issue of whether development economics is simply a branch of applied economics or whether its nature and scope constitute the need for a special development theory to supplement general economic theory.

The World Bank Administrative Tribunal is an institution which in the twelve years of its existence has acquired considerable importance and a reputation for consistency and impartiality in the exercise of its judicial function. Its case-law reveals much about the structure and working of not only the World Bank but other important international organisations. This second volume of the comprehensive digest of the WBAT's case-law which deals with cases decided between January 1988 and June 1991, like the first volume, will be of much use to the those working in and studying international organisations as well as those simply interested in the World Bank Administrative Tribunal. The author cites those parts of judgments which pertain to a particular issue so that the reader has first-hand access to the Court's actual decisions on that issue. The pronouncements are thus arranged so as to give a clear picture of the contribution each has made to the law governing the international civil service.

In the third volume of this series dealing with the Case-Law of the World Bank Administrative Tribunal, Dr Amerasinghe analyses the judgements and Orders handed down by the Tribunal between July 1, 1991 and April 30, 1996. Thus this volume covers Decisions No. 104-46 and Orders made during that period.

Despite massive investment of money and research aimed at ameliorating third-world poverty, the development strategies of the international financial institutions over the past few decades have been a profound failure. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, Africa experienced two lost decades in the 1980s and 1990s when economic growth all but disappeared. Poverty remains persistently high and inequality is rising. In Beyond the World Bank Agenda, Howard Stein argues that the controversial institution is plagued by a myopic, neoclassical mindset that wrongly focuses on individual rationality and downplays the social and political contexts that can either facilitate or impede development. Drawing on the examples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and transitional European economies, this revolutionary volume proposes an alternative vision of institutional development with chapter-length applications to finance, state formation, and health care to provide a holistic, contextualized solution to the problems of developing nations.

Despite massive investment of money and research aimed at ameliorating third-world poverty, the development strategies of the international financial institutions over the past few decades have been a profound failure. Under the tutelage of the World Bank, developing countries have experienced lower growth and rising inequality compared to previous periods. In "Beyond the World Bank Agenda", Howard Stein argues that the controversial institution is plagued by a myopic, neoclassical mindset that wrongly focuses on individual rationality and downplays the social and political contexts that can either facilitate or impede development.Drawing on the examples of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and transitional European economies, this revolutionary volume proposes an alternative vision of institutional development with chapter-length applications to finance, state formation, and health care to provide a holistic, contextualized solution to the problems of developing nations. "Beyond the World Bank Agenda" will be essential reading for anyone concerned with forging a new strategy for sustainable development.

Gendering the World Bank provides an unusual, wide-ranging and accessible account of the constitution and effects of discourses of neoliberal governance. Paying particular attention to how gender matters in and to contemporary global governance, the author focuses in particular on the development discourse of the World Bank.

Lady Thatcher's former economic advisor considers the performance of these two international institutions on their fiftieth anniversaries, and considers them in need of abolition or at least major reform.

Globalization, the return to a multi-party system of government, and the policies advocated by the IMF and the World Bank have led to near revolutionary labor relations in Ghana. As Panford shows, these new social and economic forces have unleashed new and even contradictory labor policies and practices which are having profound social, political, and economic consequences.Panford examines how the Ghana Constitution of 1992 led for the first time to new workers' rights, including the right to affiliate with any local, national, or international union. In response to globalization and policies advocated by the IMF and the World Bank, the Ghana government sought to resist worker demands for improved working and living conditions. The situation was worsened by the privatization of state-owned businesses and severe cuts in public employment. In this environment of tense labor relations, government hostility, and weak employment, Panford traces the ways workers are revitalizing unions and developing new sources of jobs and finances. These include relatively aggressive systematic organization of women, senior staff, and the informal/agricultural sector. One of the most important initiatives of the unions is the creation of a workers' trust to establish and finance worker-owned enterprises. The evidence presented by Panford indicates the failure of IMF and World Bank policies, and he calls for new and viable policy alternatives with emphasis on enhancing Ghana's global competitiveness and meeting genuine development needs. A thoughtful analysis that will be of interest to scholars and researchers involved with development and international economics, labor relations in the developing world and the increased involvement of international financial institutions.

Recent technological advances, particularly in microelectronics and telecommunications, biotechnology, and advanced materials, pose critical challenges and opportunities for developing countries, and for the development banks and other organizations that serve them. Those countries that fail to adapt to the transformations driven by new technologies in industry, agriculture, health, environment, energy, education, and other sectors may find it difficult to avoid falling behind. This book represents a joint effort by the World Bank and the National Research Council to survey the status and effect of technology change in key sectors and to recommend action by the development organizations, government, private sector and the scientific and technological community.

This book assesses the World Bank's interaction with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in projects, policy dialogue and elsewhere. Based on extensive project documents, public and private policy statements and interviews, the author identifies central organizational barriers to greater collaboration and accountability, and links these to the international political economy of the World Bank. The author suggests guidelines for judging organizational change in the World Bank, reviews opportunities and dangers for NGOs in relating with major aid donors, and discusses agenda and strategy.

This book assesses the World Bank's interaction with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in projects, policy dialogue and elsewhere.

On December 14, 1945, the House of Commons voted 314 to 50 to ratify the Agreements negotiated at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, nearly a year and a half earlier. Lord Keynes had returned from Washington to defend the Fund and the Bank, of which he and Harry White were the principal authors, as well as to justify an American loan to Britain - following President Harry S. Truman's abrupt postwar decision to terminate all land-lease assistance to its wartime allies, an event which induced the Conservative MP Robert Boothby, to declare: "This is our economic Munich". Today, fifty years later, virtually all the governments of the world have become members, and the capital subscriptions have increased many fold. But questions have arisen. Perhaps the Fund and the Bank should be merged. Some argue that fifty years are enough, at least for the Bank. Others believe that, while expansion should continue, the emphasis should be redirected toward the alleviation of poverty in Africa and southern Asia. This is an account of the historic events of the interwar years and after. It is also a story about the liberal philosophies of the political economists, primarily British and American, who produ

Structural adjustment, and the neo liberal paradigm that underlies it, is the dominant economics paradigm practised by developing countries. The main purpose of the book is to rely on evidence and to go beyond rhetoric, ideology and anecdotes in assessing structural adjustment in Pakistan and the developing world generally to examine how reform can be combined with pragmatism and social justice.

Why is it so hard for international development organizations—even ones as well-resourced and influential as the World Bank—to generate and sustain change in the way things are done in those countries where they work? Despite what, in many cases, is decades of investment and effort, why do partner governments continue to engage in those traditional patterns and styles of public service management that international development organizations have sought to supplant with methods that are supposedly more accountable, efficient, and effective? This book provides an answer to these questions. However, rather than pathologizing partner governments as the source of the problem—that is, rather than maintaining the distinction between doctor (international development organizations) and patient (partner governments), wherein the patient is seen as unwilling to take their medicine (enacting "good governance" practices)—this book instead reframes the relationship.The central argument is, first, that the programs and projects of international organizations are introduced into and are constrained by multiple layers of ritual governance, that is, performative acts and cultural logics that intersect with and reinforce the political, economic, and social structures in and through which they operate. As is shown, the contextual factors that guide governance practices are largely beyond the reach of the international development organizations; the relevant logics have their roots in state ideology but also extend back to the colonial logics that continue to operate at the heart of the state apparatus.The second the central argument is that international aid organizations and the governments with which they work are engaged in a "ritual aid dance" where each actor plays a part but does not (and cannot) acknowledge the ways that it depends on the other for its own gain. This relationship can be considered a dance because each participant responds to and needs the other, and because both sides do so in ways that are carefully choreographed, with the overall trajectory or contours of the dance being more or less known to the participants.These arguments are based on research on the World Bank’s efforts over the course of several decades to encourage, through its financing, projects, and technical assistance, the implementation of social sector reform in Indonesia related to decentralization, community participation, and school-based management.

This pilot study - the first to analyze the World Bank’s lending policy in the Second United Nations Development Decade - concentrates on the Bank’s shift in emphasis from traditional infrastructure projects to “new style” projects, especially in the area of rural development, and on the resulting changes in lending criteria in the 1970s. Basing her conclusions on two years of independent research and access to confidential materials, Dr. Hurni evaluates the World Bank’s work; gives a good overall view of current development problems - including implementation of the “growth with equity” strategy - and their possible solutions; shows the effects of the new development goals in borrower and creditor countries, as well as on the institutional decision-making process; and offers recommendations for improvement of the Bank’s evaluation methodology and operational structures. She presents a clear picture of the positive and negative aspects of the World Bank as a multilateral investment model and shows its bridge-building function in the great North-South controversy.

This pilot study - the first to analyze the World Bank’s lending policy in the Second United Nations Development Decade - concentrates on the Bank’s shift in emphasis from traditional infrastructure projects to “new style” projects, especially in the area of rural development, and on the resulting changes in lending criteria in the 1970s. Basing her conclusions on two years of independent research and access to confidential materials, Dr. Hurni evaluates the World Bank’s work; gives a good overall view of current development problems - including implementation of the “growth with equity” strategy - and their possible solutions; shows the effects of the new development goals in borrower and creditor countries, as well as on the institutional decision-making process; and offers recommendations for improvement of the Bank’s evaluation methodology and operational structures. She presents a clear picture of the positive and negative aspects of the World Bank as a multilateral investment model and shows its bridge-building function in the great North-South controversy.

This title was first published in 2001: Bringing together geographers, planners, political scientists, economists, rural development specialists, bankers, public administrators and other development experts, this volume questions the benefits of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). It critically assesses the impact of SAPs from a wider perspective than a purely economic one, highlighting concerns about impacts of adjustments on the more vulnerable elements of society such as social welfare, the environment, labour, gender and agriculture. Revealing both the costs and benefits of the economic restructuring programme, the book also suggests alternatives to current development models, and how SAPs can be made more sustainable. An original and comprehensive addition to the collections of both students and practitioners of development.

This book considers the nature of change at the World Bank, exploring both the external impetous for change, and the impact of the Bank's internal organization and culture. The author's findings are supported by detailed case studies of three of the Bank's most important new agendas:* private sector development* participation* governance

Shortlisted for the Inaugural International Political Economy Group annual book prize, 2006.An incisive exploration of the interventions of the World Bank in severely indebted African states. Understanding sovereignty as a frontier rather than a boundary, this key study develops a vision of a powerful international organization reconciling a global political economy with its own designs and a specific set of challenges posed by the African region. This analysis details the nature of the World Bank intervention in the sovereign frontier, investigating institutional development, discursive intervention, and political stabilization. It tackles the methods by which the World Bank has led a project to re-shape certain African states according to a governance template, leading to the presentation of 'success stories' in a continent associated with reform failure.This conceptually innovative book details a political economy of the World Bank in Africa that is both globally contextualized and attentive to individual states. It is the only volume to look at the bank's relations with Africa and will interest all students and researchers of African politics and the World Bank.

As one of the world’s most powerful supranational institutions, the World Bank has played an important role in international development discourse and practice since 1946. This is the first book-length history and analysis of the Bank’s urban programs and their complex relationship to urban policy formulation in the developing world. Through extensive primary research, the book examines four major themes: the political and economic forces that propelled the reluctant World Bank to finally embrace urban programs in the 1970show the Bank fashioned its general ideology of development into specific urban projectstrends and transitions within the Bank’s urban agenda from its inception to the presentthe World Bank’s historic and contemporary role in the complex interaction between global, national, and local forces that shape the urban agendas of developing countries. The book also examines how protests from NGOs and civic movements, in the context of globalization and neo-liberalism, have influenced the World Bank policies from the 1990s to the present. The institution’s attempts to restructure and legitimate itself, in light of shifting geo-political and intellectual contexts, are considered throughout.

The debate on whether or not the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and their intervention strategies are a positive force for change in the developing world continues to rage. Featuring both macroeconomic and microeconomic approaches, this book brings together an international team of contributors and centres upon three broad themes:the ideology of the IMF and World Bankpoverty reductionconditionality.In exploring these themes, this book will be a valuable reference for postgraduate students and professionals in the fields of development studies and political economy.

The World Bank is one of the most important and least understood major international institutions. This book provides a concise, accessible and comprehensive overview of the World Bank's history, development, structure, functionality and activities. These themes are illustrated with a wide variety of case studies drawn from the Bank's international activities. Also discussed are the controversial challenges that the Bank now faces in the light of the criticism from campaigners and NGOs.

The World Bank is one of the most important and least understood major international institutions. This book provides a concise, accessible and comprehensive overview of the World Bank's history, development, structure, functionality and activities. These themes are illustrated with a wide variety of case studies drawn from the Bank's international activities. Also discussed are the controversial challenges that the Bank now faces in the light of the criticism from campaigners and NGOs.