Sustainable models of world banking

Filed in archive Int'l Development on May 1, 2006

(Photo from YPSA)

Back to sustainable development to start the week, but first we'll take a step back with this essay on the World Bank which has been the leading purveyor of top-heavy development for far too long.

*The World Bank legacy of James Wolfensohn comes under the microscope at Naked Punch (in pdf):

With all the hullabaloo generated by the designation of Paul Wolfowitz as his successor, outgoing World Bank President James Wolfensohn's record in leading the Bank has so far escaped serious scrutiny. Wolfensohn's was an ambitious presidency. Chosen by President Bill Clinton to head the world's largest multilateral lender in 1995, Australian turned-American Wolfensohn promised to make the Bank more sensitive to the needs of developing countries. The institution was then identified with structural adjustment programs that had wrenched developing country economies without bringing about growth, and with controversial projects such as environmentally and socially destabilizing land resettlement schemesn in the Amazons and Indonesia, and large dams, notable among which were the Arun III in Nepal and the Sardar Sarover in India.

*Also, see this commentary at TCS Daily on bad management of the malaria problem in Africa:

In 1998, the World Bank along with other health agencies launched the Roll Back Malaria campaign, promising to halve malaria deaths this decade. The Bank made an unprecedented pledge before Africa's heads of state in 2000: It would spend $300-500 million to fight malaria in Africa. This promise of funding was warmly welcomed, since contemporary economic arguments held that malaria cost Africa dearly -- perhaps on the order of tens of billions of dollars a year.

But the Bank failed to deliver. And rather than admit such failure with candor, it concealed the fact using opaque and contradictory accounting. In 2001, the Bank made the impressive claim that it had "about $450 million out in various forms of anti-malaria programs." But by 2002, it appeared to backtrack, writing that "Bank direct financing for malaria control activities is over US$200 million." In just one year, the Bank had slashed a quarter of a billion dollars of malaria control funding, and nearly halved the number of countries it assisted.

*Down at the micro level, I was given this article (which you'll have to purchase, I believe) on "Creating Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks" from MIT's Sloan Management Review which looks at 50 cases of successful sustainable enterprise in developing countries and what has made them work.

*And also, see this paper (in pdf) from a few years ago at the Harvard Institute for International Development examines Commercial bank behavior in micro and small enterprise finance. Worth a look, though probably should be updated.

*Lastly the Private Sector Development Blog, run by members of the World Bank Group, has a great list of links to blogs and information sources covering international development.