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Protecting Power: How Western States Retain The Dominant Voice in The World Bank’s Governance
Abstract
The global economic crisis raised the urgency of reforming the Bretton Woods organizations in order to get more “buy in” from developing countries. But the “voice” reforms announced in 2010, heralded as a major shift in favor of developing countries, left them severely under-represented relative to their weight in the world economy, both collectively and many individually. This paper reveals how the World Bank and representatives of western states manipulated the process to make voting power changes appear substantial. The paper then discusses alternative voting power systems for the Bank, in light of the generally accepted need to enhance the legitimacy of the organization.
... in line with the reforms proposed for the World Bank by the Zedillo Commission in 2009, the 2010 "voice reform" appeared to be a step in the right direction, increasing the share of voices for developing and transition countries (dTCs) from 42.6 to 47.19 percent, while decreasing developed countries' share from 57.40 to 52.81 percent (Vestergaard and Wade 2013). The reform also created a new (25th) executive director for Sub-Saharan african countries. ...
... The reform also created a new (25th) executive director for Sub-Saharan african countries. however, what was heralded as a substantial shift turned out in fact to be marginal change (Vestergaard and Wade 2013), or "little more than old wine in new bottles" (Strand and Retzl 2016, 438). The dTC category includes several high-income countries (such as South korea and Singapore) that do not borrow from the Bank, with the share of developing countries rising to only 38.38 percent if they are excluded (Vestergaard and Wade 2013). in the absence of profound reforms toward a more balanced governance structure that goes beyond voice realignment, the frustration of borrowing countries, which has arguably contributed to setting up parallel multilateral institutions such as aiid and ndB, will continue unabated. ...
... however, what was heralded as a substantial shift turned out in fact to be marginal change (Vestergaard and Wade 2013), or "little more than old wine in new bottles" (Strand and Retzl 2016, 438). The dTC category includes several high-income countries (such as South korea and Singapore) that do not borrow from the Bank, with the share of developing countries rising to only 38.38 percent if they are excluded (Vestergaard and Wade 2013). in the absence of profound reforms toward a more balanced governance structure that goes beyond voice realignment, the frustration of borrowing countries, which has arguably contributed to setting up parallel multilateral institutions such as aiid and ndB, will continue unabated. ...
For some time now, there has been a push for the World Bank to shift its focus toward global public goods (GPGs). These are goods that, once delivered, can be unrestrictedly consumed by most—if not all—countries on the planet. Nor are their benefits rivalrous. Moreover, the production of GPGs cannot be left to markets or individual countries, as these have suboptimal incentives to act. In the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak, the concept of GPGs has seen a revival of sorts, with the pandemic not only striking just as multilateralism was at its lowest ebb, but also serving as irrefutable proof that the world needs international collaboration now more than ever. Multilateral institutions, and in particular the World Bank—a leading global institution with global membership—can rightfully be regarded as a possible solution to many global challenges. Based on interviews conducted with World Bank senior staff, as well as numerous experts, this article discusses arguments in favor of such a strategic shift. While there are legitimate claims for the Bank becoming a full-fledged provider of GPGs, the institution’s historical roots and operational constraints make this an unlikely prospect.
... The IMF attempted a reform in 2010 with some pros. But it was not enough(VESTERGAARD & WADE, 2013). They show that high-income countries still retain more than 60% of the voting share. ...
What changes has brought the New Development Bank ?
How the change of the international monetary system can help its action to increase?
... Representing 189 member states (in 2023), it is mainly run by a small group of economically strong countries. These countries not only select management and leadership of the organization but also determine policies and projects due to the unequal allocation of voting power in the Board of Executive Directors (Vestergaard and Wade 2013). In particular since the turn of the century, criticism has increased as the Bank's governing structure has not accounted for political and economic changes in the world, which would require to give emerging market economies for instance more voice (Woods 2006). ...
... However, the most influential developing countries do not want to be bound to a rigid structure of sharing responsibilities. They have maintained a cautious position in the face of a possible 'hegemonic incorporation' into the traditional IDC regime (Vestergaard and Wade 2013). Hence, they constantly reaffirm that SSC is complementary and not a substitute for North-South cooperation (Gore 2013). ...
In the past, International Development Cooperation (IDC) was an analogue for Official Development Assistance (ODA) in which three central institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (DAC/OECD) regulated the practices of donors and recipients. Recently, a far more complex and diversified scenario characterized by new actors and approaches is replacing this architecture. This paper analyses the transformations in the IDC field, interpreting these processes through an analytical framework of the sources of institutional change. One of its principal contributions is highlighting a pattern of “punctuated equilibrium” through a theory-guided historical analysis, that reflects both periods of stasis and innovation instead of a gradual process of change. We argue that innovation depends on dissatisfaction and shocks, and that the nature of invention depends on a homogeneity of interests among its prominent actors. This paper is based on a research agenda that applies the punctuated equilibrium concept of social theory to the analysis of international regime complexes.
... En este contexto, los responsables políticos se vuelcan cada vez más hacia los especialistas o hacia un conocimiento experto para disminuir dicha incertidumbre, comprender los fenómenos recientes y anticipar futuras tendencias (Haas, 1992). Ahora bien, en la búsqueda de creencias sólidas, este "conocimiento confiable" puede decantar en influencias políticas por parte de quienes lo proporcionan (Vestergaard y Wade, 2013). ...
El enfoque de Global Value Chains se ha convertido en el nuevo instrumento de desarrollo en las últimas dos décadas, desde su emergencia a comienzos de siglo. Este trabajo se propone, por un lado, estudiar la convergencia entre sus principales investigadores y los organismos internacionales al momento de la traducción práctica de su marco teórico, dando lugar a la formación de una comunidad epistémica en torno a estas ideas. Mientras que, en segundo lugar, se propone indagar en las principales limitaciones, ausencias y omisiones teóricas para entender la problemática del desarrollo en forma comprensiva.
... In response, status quo powers have supported governance reforms, albeit reluctantly in some cases. Both the IMF and the World Bank have acknowledged the threat of "exit" by emerging powers due to perceived underrepresentation as a fundamental reason for initiating voice and vote reforms in 2008 and 2010 (Kaya 2015;Moschella and Weaver 2017;Vestergaard 2011;Vestergaard and Wade 2013;Felicity and von Borzyskowski 2022). ...
The legitimacy and effectiveness of international organizations are often linked directly to issues of representation—not only on their high-level governing boards and in top leadership but also within their staff. This article explores two key questions of bureaucratic representation in the critical cases of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. First, we seek to unpack three essential dimensions of staff representation—nationality, education, and gender—to explain how representation may matter for international organizations. Second, we aim to describe the multiple dimensions of representation in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over the past twenty years by deploying a novel dataset on staff demographics, focusing on ranks with decision-making authority within the institutions. Our descriptive analysis reveals that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have made considerable efforts to diversify their bureaucracies. Nonetheless, representation remains uneven; for example, nationals from middle- and low-income countries, women, and staff without economics degrees from prominent US- or UK-based universities are less present in key leadership positions. These results may be well explained by the particular needs of the institutions’ technical mandates and limits in the supply of qualified staff and, as such, need not be seen as suboptimal. Nonetheless, perceived imbalances in representation may continue to pose external legitimation and operational challenges to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in a complex political environment where such multidimensional representation is important to sustaining the buy-in of donor and borrower countries alike. To this end, we recommend that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank enhance their diversity and inclusion efforts by increasing transparency via reporting disaggregated data on workforce composition and introducing annual requirements to publish progress reports with management feedback to strengthen internal and external accountability.
... Whether it is through trust funds or traditional lending windows, wealthy governments have the biggest say in IFI activities. Revamping the governance arrangements of Western-based IFIs has been a long-term objective of developing countries, yet the various reform rounds have only moderately rebalanced voting shares while still protecting the power of countries in the Global North (Vestergaard and Wade 2013;Buira 2005). Re ecting such frustrations, as mentioned above, China and other powerful developing economies set up new IFIs, with the aim of presenting alternative options to the Northern-dominated institutions. ...
Having sizeable lending capacity and unparalleled epistemic power, international financial institutions (IFIs) are the world’s most powerful international organizations. One class of IFIs is primarily focused on lending for development projects, and commands portfolios of hundreds of millions of dollars that can transform infrastructure and social services in low- and middle-income countries. Another class is geared toward providing financial assistance to countries in economic crisis and has an active role in shaping their policy environments. Through these activities, IFIs alter the development trajectories of borrowing countries, for better or for worse. This article reviews these debates. We first map IFI forms and functions and examine their governance structures. Subsequently, we examine two of the leading controversies surrounding IFI activities: the problematic impact of these activities on social and environmental outcomes; and the charge that they impinge on developing countries’ policy sovereignty. We conclude by outlining fruitful directions for future research.
... In comparative terms, the success of the NDB in maintaining the strong club culture resonates because of the differences with the AIIB. Chinese control over the AIIB systematically reproduces the structural power provided for the U.S. and Europe with respect to the post-1945 IFIs and within regional organizations such as the ADB (where China and India have relatively small shares of voting rights, 5.5% and 5.4%, respectively, in comparison to Japan and the U.S., which each hold 12.8%) [Reisen, 2015;Vestergaard, Wade, 2013]. Along the lines of the IFIs, the basic votes and founding members' votes are set, and the share vote is distributed based on the size of each member's GDP, providing China with a built-in advantage. ...
BRICS has commonly been framed through a strictly economic perspective, with a focus on the growth patterns of the individual members: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Viewed in this fashion, the grouping is judged in a negative manner, with a sense of disappointment and frustration. Yet, framed in a wider diplomatic context, the image of BRICS is quite different, with an accent on several features that cast a more positive interpretation. BRICS: A Very Short Introduction highlighted these features in 2016. And, notwithstanding some unanticipated developments that exaggerated the differences—and tensions— between the members of BRICS, it is the staying power and pattern of evolution in a creative fashion of the BRICS club that stands out. Although overshadowed by other multilateral institutions, the achievements of the New Development Bank (NDB) should not be downplayed. Moreover, BRICS has developed problem (or even crisis) management techniques. As with other informal institutions with club-like attributes, some of these tensions were dealt with by avoiding issues that divided the members. Over time, though, this template has been complemented by more active forms of problem-solving relating to internal differences.
... In any case, while such de-Westernising institutions as the BRICS New Development Bank are established (Al-Kassimi, 2018;Mignolo, 2021), confrontation joins with contestation within the institutions of global coloniality, where especially the BRICS -individually or collectively -frequently strategically ally with the G-77 (Cooper, 2021;Gürcan, 2019;Hopewell, 2017). Although SSC may indeed have engendered a partial 'fracturing' of the historical North-South hierarchies (Mawdsley, 2020), the North's 'manipulation' of the World Bank voting power adjustment process (see Vestergaard & Wade, 2013), however, is indicative of the limits to such a strategy, and of the Global North's steadfast resistance to any more substantive democratization of the global order, i.e. the even slightest challenge to the colonial matrix of power. ...
Framed by the North–South conflict, this article conducts a historico-conceptual analysis of the politics of South-South cooperation (SSC) from a decolonial Global South perspective. Based on documentary analysis and a review of academic SSC literature, three distinct periods of SSC post-1945 are identified: Concertation (1945–1981); Containment (1981–1995); and Cooptation vs Confrontation (1995–present). This periodization complements previous endeavours of its kind, whereby the rationale here is that a historical understanding of SSC politics and neo-colonial/imperialist counter-politics is indispensable for emancipatory social praxis. With co-optation of SSC backed by coercion as the Global North’s contemporary tactic within the strategy of re-Westernisation, I argue for the Global South to reclaim SSC as a strategy to move from delinking as de-Westernisation towards delinking as decoloniality in the context of crisis of the capitalist world order.
Free download: https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/UAQFWD2T55IZMU45XVW7/full?target=10.1080/14747731.2022.2082132
... the management is dominated by Western nations rather than subject to the one country-one vote formula that often paralyzes the United Nations General Assembly. (Vestergaard, & Wade, 2013). ...
This thesis aimed to define the concepts of food insecurity, aid dependency and recognize the external and internal poverty effects in Somalia. The thesis defines the critical role of food aid organizations and political stakeholders who mainly concentrated on their vision of improving the Somali society's needs and reducing poverty, despite the fact that they still have so little to solve Somali poverty.
Somalia’s food insecurity involves a variety of causes such as political, economic, social, and environmental variables. The study investigates the role of economic reforms that affected the Somali economy that depended on the exchange of goods between farmers and pastoralists. The thesis addresses the hidden gap in existing food security causes by exploring how innovation solves corruption, crime, and food shortages in practice.
At the end of the thesis, solutions for the critical features that require action in Somalia are presented. Potential problems with Somali poverty were locally identified. A direct solution to improve the non-consumption groups, engage in development processes, and reduce poverty via innovation and self-improvement was analyzed.
... Firstly, China and other emerging economies have long sought greater influence within the established Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and IMF, corresponding to their growing economic weight (Kahler 2013, 714). Despite promises of greater influence in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008/9, actual changes have been both small and slow to materialise, leaving China and other non-Western countries severely underrepresented (Vestergaard and Wade 2013). It is worth highlighting how, in this instance, China's integration into the old institutional framework of the liberal order is being hampered, not by its own lack of interest, but by the refusal of Western powers to share influence more equitably within these institutions. ...
China’s rise is widely regarded as constituting a challenge to the Liberal International Order built in the aftermath of WWII and expanded after the end of the Cold War. This paper assesses the state of the liberal order as it is manifested in East Asia’s regional order today. It presents two main arguments. Empirically, by analysing international trade in the region over the last four decades, I find that China has already assumed a central position in the region’s trade structure. China’s economic ascent is also increasingly evident in the region’s institutional architecture. Theoretically, I propose an ‘autonomous conception of international order’ as a theoretical framework through which to understand these developments. In contrast to much of the existing literature, this approach theorises the liberal order independently of US hegemony. By doing so, it (a) makes a distinction between China’s geopolitical ambitions and its supposed revisionism of the rules and norms of the liberal order; (b) posits the liberal order as an independent factor in the strategic environment of smaller- and medium-sized states in the region; and (c) elucidates the increasingly ambivalent policies of the US towards the liberal order. Viewed through this framework, I argue that China’s rise challenges US’s regional hegemony, but has, so far, not resulted in revisions to the rules-based, liberal order.
... At the IFIs, power is preserved through weighted voting in the Executive Board. Powerful donors have long supported their primacy in the decision-making process of IFIs, so that reform efforts had only modest effects on voting shares (Vestergaard & Wade, 2013). The result is the strong underrepresentation, measured in relation to the share of world economic output, of certain emerging economies in the executive board. ...
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ascribe to impartiality in their mandates. At the same time, scholarship indicates that their decisions are disproportionately influenced by powerful member states. Impartiality is seen as crucial in determining International Organizations’ (IOs) effectiveness and legitimacy in the literature. However, we know little about whether key interlocutors in national governments perceive the International Financial Institutions as biased actors who do the bidding for powerful member states or as impartial executors of policy. In order to better understand these perceptions, we surveyed high-level civil servants who are chiefly responsible for four policy areas from more than 100 countries. We found substantial variations in impartiality perceptions. What explains these variations? By developing an argument of selective awareness, we extend rationalist and ideational perspectives on IO impartiality to explain domestic perceptions. Using novel survey data, we test whether staffing underrepresentation, voting underrepresentation, alignment to the major shareholders and overlapping economic policy paradigms are associated with impartiality perceptions. We find substantial evidence that shared economic policy paradigms influence impartiality perceptions. The findings imply that by diversifying their ideational culture, IOs can increase the likelihood that domestic stakeholders view them as impartial.
OPEN ACCESS AT: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09692290.2020.1749711
... The WB's "voice feform" includes many changes to improve internal governance, including adjusting voting weight for developing countries (World Bank 2010). However, the increase in voting shares did not significantly increase the share of votes by developing countries (Strand &Retzl, 2016;Reisen, 2015;Vestergaard& Wade, 2013). In short, despite the recent institutional adjustment in WB, the influence of China, Brazil, and other major rising powers is still small compared to the United States, Japan and EU members. ...
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) is a new international financial institution set up in 2015 with the goal of supporting the construction of infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) were formed together in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in July 1944. Both are set up to support the world economy, although each has different roles. The role of the International Monetary Fund is to protect the monetary system. Meanwhile, the World Bank plays a role in economic development. Although the size and potential of the AIIB is smaller, it is not so different from the IMF and the WB. Thus, the AIIB is considered a competitor of the IMF and WB and will bring challenges to the existence of the Bretton Woods system with the two leading WB and IMF financial institutions. In addition, according to expert opinion, the AIIB does not have austerity policies such as IMF, so the AIIB will quickly take over many sectors in the economy outside Asia as well as Europe, especially Eastern Europe. This will alleviate the importance, scale and potential of the two largest financial institutions in the world, the IMF and WB.
... The IMF reform plan, for instance, was hindered primarily by the US, although the European countries not the US would directly face the problem of losing voting share. The reform plan has been blocked by the US Congress for a long time to come (Lesage, 2013; Vestergaard and Wade, 2013). If proposed reform is implemented, the US financial commitments to the IMF would not be increased. ...
... The combination of relatively rigid governance structures and gaps of governance has reinforced old distributions of power and, in turn, meant that the legitimacy and effectiveness of legacy organizations have been repeatedly questioned (Best, 2007;Vestergaard & Wade, 2013). Demands to fundamentally reform the Bretton Woods system began in the 1970s when a large coalition of developing nations turned to the United Nations General Assembly to launch ambitious reform initiatives and developed proposals that would displace legacy organizations (Hart, 1983;Krasner, 1985). ...
The international economic system that emerged after the 1944 Bretton Woods conference became the most durable international arrangement devoted to economic openness. Seventy-five years after the conference, however, global shifts in power, institutional gridlock, and populist backlash figure prominently in accounts predicting the system’s demise. This article examines the legacies of the Bretton Woods conference for structures and practices of global economic governance and innovations that emerged over time to adapt the system to new political and economic circumstances. It explores how and why the Bretton Woods system became a more variegated system over time with respect to four features of governance: membership, legalization, organizational focality, and market embeddedness. It identifies sources and effects of expanding membership in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the emergence of new formal and informal institutions, the challenges of a more fragmented institutional landscape, and shifts in the underlying principles of economic governance. Finally, the article discusses lessons from past crises in and reforms to the Bretton Woods system, and their implications for understanding recent challenges to global economic cooperation.
... It is certainly the face of structural power where most research has been undertaken, perhaps unsurprisingly given the concept's genesis in IPE. Recent research has found structural advantage in the US's centrality to global banking networks (Emmenegger 2015;Fichtner 2016); in the ability of its private sector banks and national treasury to create and emit excess credit (Schwartz 2017); in US dominance of TNCs, profits, and global production flows (Phillips 2017;Starrs 2013;; within formal financial institutions (Vestergaard and Wade 2013); through informal dollarization (Helleiner 2005); and of course, in the dollar's 'exorbitant privilege' of reserve currency status (Cohen 2015;Eichengreen 2012;Norloff 2014;Prasad 2014;Stokes 2014). The impact of all these structural advantages is that they enable the US economy to claim a disproportionate share of global resources (Seabrooke 2006), free from balance of payments constraints (Gowan 1999). ...
Over the past twenty years, debates surrounding American power have oscillated between celebrations of empire and laments of decline. What explains such wild fluctuations? This article argues that the power shifts debate rests on an underpinning concept of power based around relative capabilities that is theoretically not fit for purpose. We propose instead an approach to power shifts that locates power primarily in structural power. In doing so we show that developments in the character of the international system render structural advantage more significant to questions of international leadership than the balance of national capabilities. These developments also mitigate against systemic changes that might bring relative strength and structural position into greater alignment. © 2019
Este trabajo ofrece un acercamiento inicial sobre la dinámica y el rol que poseen, en el escenario económico mundial, las empresas chinas de capital mayoritariamente público. Se trata de empresas que son gestionadas por The State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC), una comisión que actúa como inversor privado a nombre del Estado chino. Se construye el argumento de que estas corporaciones se presentan como un “modelo” de empresa o agencia capitalista con elementos que se consideran “innovadores” en el sentido de que las colocan en una posición de potencial liderazgo en la dinámica de acumulación de capital a escala mundial, es decir, que podría ser tendencialmente replicado. Al mismo tiempo, se explora la idea de que un brazo de expansión fundamental para estas empresas ha sido la participación de China en un esquema de cooperación Sur-Sur que se despliega de manera paralela al tradicional, Norte-Sur.
El régimen de ayuda y cooperación internacional apuntaló la hegemonía de los Estados Unidos desde finales de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, bajo una lógica vertical entre donantes y receptores que corre de Norte a Sur. Dicho régimen disciplinar y realmente antidesarrollista se ha visto contestado en lo que va del siglo XXI por la consolidación de un régimen internacional de cooperación Sur-Sur promovido por China y otras potencias emergentes. En este panorama de competencia estratégica entre el hegemón en declive, Estados Unidos, y China en su desarrollo pacífico, se puede entrever el surgimiento y coexistencia de un nuevo orden mundial que trastoca los procesos de cooperación internacional incluidos como recurso de poder blando en las relaciones económicas y geopolíticas internacionales.
Este libro, producto de las reflexiones de distintos autores latinoamericanos y europeos, busca contribuir al debate de la cooperación internacional en tiempos de competencia estratégica entre Estados Unidos y China. Se distinguen dos grandes propuestas analíticas planteadas por los autores del volumen, aquellas que ubican la discusión en torno al interregno de una posible transición hegemónica y las que, al cuestionar el concepto occidental de hegemonía, proponen que se trata de un trayecto hacia un mundo multipolar presidido por un tipo de globalización más incluyente. La obra es la octavo de la serie crítica promovida por la Red Iberoamericana Académica de Cooperación Internacional (RIACI), en conjunto con el Grupo de Investigación en Cooperación Sur-Sur e Integraciones Regionales de la Red Española de Estudios del Desarrollo (GICSS-REEDES), y se publica en coedición entre el Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades “Alfonso Vélez Pliego” de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (ICSyH-BUAP), México, y la Universidad de Cantabria (UC), España.
International organizations (IOs) are often criticized for insulated decision‐making processes that do not react to the preferences of key stakeholders that are directly affected by them. However, empirical studies probing the degree to which IOs’ policies are aligned with the preferences of such key constituencies are scarce. This paper tackles the gap by studying the case of the World Bank. We argue that congruence with stakeholder preferences increases when recipients have institutional means of participation and decreases when donors restrict the purposes of their funds. We utilize survey data from 269 stakeholder surveys conducted in 114 countries between 2012 and 2022 for our empirical analysis. Our findings carry important implications for the responsiveness of IOs to stakeholders in low‐ and middle‐income countries.
The G20 shines out as the foremost international forum that brings together the heads of state - or heads of government - of all the leading economic and political powers in contemporary global affairs on a regular basis to effectively generate joint action plans.
Chapter 2 analyses some foundational ideas relied upon in the book. This conceptual base comprises an analysis of nature, the environment, development, and sustainable development. These concepts are discussed as a progressive movement of a complex ideation: where nature is conceptualised as the starting point, later becomes the environment, then advances to become development, and is finally transformed into sustainable development. I employ Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) in my analysis of neo-imperial ideologies and allied Eurocentric philosophies and how these are embedded in the contemporary language of sustainable development. At each stage of the analysis, I highlight the significance of human agency as the defining character of the transformations that occur within this conceptual fluidity. It accounts for the persistence of the subtext of Eurocentrism and demonstrates how the interplay of law, politics, ethics, and history as sustainable development is established upon different elements of both law and non-law theories. The analysis in this chapter is refracted through ’Afrosensitivity’, which I describe as a reaction to Africa as a conceptual tool in sustainable development discourse, and as a conscious, alternative route for imprinting African legal cosmologies on this global phenomenon called sustainable development.
This original book analyses and reimagines the concept of sustainable development in international law from a non-Western legal perspective. Built upon the intersection of law, politics, and history in the context of Africa, its peoples and their experiences, customary law and other legal cosmologies, this ground-breaking study applies a critical legal analysis to Africa's interaction with conceptualising and operationalising sustainable development. It proposes a turn to non-Western legal normativity as the foundational principle for reimagining sustainable development in international law. It highlights eco-legal philosophies and principles in remaking sustainable development where ecological integrity assumes a central focus in the reimagined conceptualisation and operationalisation of sustainable development. While this pioneering book highlights Africa as its analytical pivot, its arguments and proposals are useful beyond Africa. Connecting global discourses on nature, the environment, rights and development, Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah illuminates our current thinking on sustainable development in international law.
This original book analyses and reimagines the concept of sustainable development in international law from a non-Western legal perspective. Built upon the intersection of law, politics, and history in the context of Africa, its peoples and their experiences, customary law and other legal cosmologies, this ground-breaking study applies a critical legal analysis to Africa's interaction with conceptualising and operationalising sustainable development. It proposes a turn to non-Western legal normativity as the foundational principle for reimagining sustainable development in international law. It highlights eco-legal philosophies and principles in remaking sustainable development where ecological integrity assumes a central focus in the reimagined conceptualisation and operationalisation of sustainable development. While this pioneering book highlights Africa as its analytical pivot, its arguments and proposals are useful beyond Africa. Connecting global discourses on nature, the environment, rights and development, Godwin Eli Kwadzo Dzah illuminates our current thinking on sustainable development in international law.
Many scholars have investigated the politics of World Bank Group (WBG) lending, often finding that WBG loans are distributed in ways that advance US policy interests. However, the organisation’s other major activity, promoting foreign direct investment (FDI), has received little attention. This study fills this void in the literature, with attention to the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), the youngest of the five agencies that collectively make up the WBG. MIGA provides multinational companies with insurance to protect their investments from non-commercial risks in host countries, such as the outbreak of civil war or government expropriation. Given considerable evidence that WBG loans support US interests, MIGA’s risk insurance may be similarly politicised. However, since MIGA is financially independent and prohibits political activity, we theorise that US influence operates informally through MIGA staff, who reward US-aligned countries to ‘please the principal,’ and hence ensure that the US continues to support the Agency. Empirical analysis based on over 1500 MIGA-insured investments covering 121 member countries over the 1990–2020 period shows that MIGA insurance is disproportionately rewarded to investments in host countries that support US policy interests. Our findings suggest that this politicisation is primarily staff-led.
This Element offers a novel, highly relevant perspective towards Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), which are development and financial organizations at the same time. Based on the elaborate institutional logics perspective borrowed from organizational sociology, it uncovers the complex trade-offs between financial and development pressures faced by MDBs and explains variation in organizational responses thereto across types of MDBs. The argument is tested with an original dataset using Data Envelopment Analysis to explain variation in response patterns across MDBs. The analysis shows that lending to the private sector as well as being predominantly owned by borrowing members increase MDBs' emphasis on the financial at the expense of the development nature. Thereby, this Element provides unique insights into MDBs' responses to their dual nature and significantly advances our understanding of MDB lending operations, drawing attention to the complexities involved in the unique MDB business model.
Why does China select different reform path in the US-dominated international institutions? Based on the combination of social network theory and a theory of gradual institutional change, this paper argues that two factors are determinants of rising country’s path selection, namely the network power of the established country and the ambiguity of the existing international institutions. In the cross-border interbank payments area, the American strong network power and high ambiguity of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) make China choose the path for layering the system. In the area of internet-assigned names, the American strong network power and low ambiguity of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Name and Number (ICANN) induce China to choose the path for avoiding the system. In terms of development finance, the American weak network power and low ambiguity of the World Bank make China choose the path for displacing the system.
Advancing a new approach to the study of international order, this book highlights the stakes disguised by traditional theoretical languages of power transitions and hegemonic wars. Rather than direct challenges to US military power, the most consequential undermining of hegemony is routine, bottom-up processes of international goods substitution: a slow hollowing out of the existing order through competition to seek or offer alternative sources for economic, military, or social goods. Studying how actors gain access to alternative suppliers of these public goods, this volume shows how states consequently move away from the liberal international order. Examining unfamiliar – but crucial – cases, it takes the reader on a journey from local Faroese politics, to Russian election observers in Central Asia, to South American drug lords. Broadening the debate about the role of public goods in international politics, this book offers a new perspective of one of the key issues of our time.
Cite as: Küçük, Ö. (2019). DÜNYA BANKASI’NIN TÜRKİYE’DEKİ İKTİSADİ KALKINMA ANLAYIŞINA ETKİSİ VE SOSYAL POLİTİKAYA YANSIMALARI. DOKTORA TEZİ. Kocaeli Üniversitesi, Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü, Kocaeli. ABSTRACT....
The World Bank is a interational financial institution that influences the economic an social policies of under developed societies and emerging economies. The way to understand the effects of the Bank on Turkey is the best way to possible and analyze the historical process leading to the establishment of World Bank. History
professor and a member of the democratic party, Woodrow Wilson was main founder of League of Nations. Wilson has not established the League of Nations for a single
purpose, such as the end of wars. Wilson sensed that trade barriers were removed and open economies could only be possible in peacetime. The “general disarmament” and “permanent peace” in the Wilson Principles therefore take place. When Wilson was
unable to win Senate approval for U.S.participation in the League, he said “America missed a historical opportunity.” The World Bank in Turkey, converts the 1950’s, the development approach based on public ownership of private property based on the production of consumer goods. Turkey Industrial and Development Bank (TIDB) founded by World Bank in 1950, supports private ownership-based investments. At the same time, the delegation sent by the World Bank in the same year prepares the Barker Report. TIDB provides
loans to Turkish companies for the first time in order to facilitate the import of investment goods and intermediate goods from Amerika. The underplanned period ends with establishment of the State Planning Organisation (SPO) in 1960. The first five year development plan came into force in 1963 after the establish of SPO, but the
World Bank is cautions. Therefore, for the first five year development plan, money is provided from the Soviet Union as neither the World Bank nor the TIDB grant credit. The World Bank, the production of consumer goods industry based on private property in Turkey, helped establish, however, is always opposed to the establishment of heavy industry and production of investment goods.World Bank, investment by facilating the import of goods from the United States, Turkey has prevented the development of welfare state and social policies of the past and into industrialization.
Why do some donor governments pursue international development through recipient governments, while others bypass such local authorities? Weaving together scholarship in political economy, public administration and historical institutionalism, Simone Dietrich argues that the bureaucratic institutions of donor countries shape donor–recipient interactions differently despite similar international and recipient country conditions. Donor nations employ institutional constraints that authorize, enable and justify particular aid delivery tactics while precluding others. Offering quantitative and qualitative analyses of donor decision-making, the book illuminates how donors with neoliberally organized public sectors bypass recipient governments, while donors with more traditional public-sector-oriented institutions cooperate and engage recipient authorities on aid delivery. The book demonstrates how internal beliefs and practices about states and markets inform how donors see and set their objectives for foreign aid and international development itself. It informs debates about aid effectiveness and donor coordination and carries implications for the study of foreign policy, more broadly.
Why do some donor governments pursue international development through recipient governments, while others bypass such local authorities? Weaving together scholarship in political economy, public administration and historical institutionalism, Simone Dietrich argues that the bureaucratic institutions of donor countries shape donor–recipient interactions differently despite similar international and recipient country conditions. Donor nations employ institutional constraints that authorize, enable and justify particular aid delivery tactics while precluding others. Offering quantitative and qualitative analyses of donor decision-making, the book illuminates how donors with neoliberally organized public sectors bypass recipient governments, while donors with more traditional public-sector-oriented institutions cooperate and engage recipient authorities on aid delivery. The book demonstrates how internal beliefs and practices about states and markets inform how donors see and set their objectives for foreign aid and international development itself. It informs debates about aid effectiveness and donor coordination and carries implications for the study of foreign policy, more broadly.
The New Development Bank (NDB) and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) were built by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS countries) in response to the ‘disappointing’ Bretton Woods Institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The main difference between the Bretton Woods Institutions and the BRICS institutions is that the latter adopts an equal‐weight system instead of a weighted voting system in the NDB (all five BRICS countries have equal shares and voting weights regardless of the major differences in their economic weights) and uses consensus instead of majority voting rules to make decisions regarding critical issues in the CRA. In fact, both the equal‐weight system and consensus rule are unprecedented in the history of multilateral financial institutions. The World Bank, the IMF, the Asian Development Bank and even the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) all adopt weighted voting systems and majority voting rules. We explain why the BRICS countries adopt these unprecedented designs through precise power measurements and carefully designed experiments. First, we measure the voting power of each member of the BRICS’ NDB and CRA under the current decision‐making systems, using this information as a control group. Then, we remeasure the voting power of each member of the NDB under the assumption that their shares and voting weights are allocated according to their economic weights; additionally, we remeasure the voting power of each country of the CRA under the assumption that majority rules are adopted when decisions are being made on critical issues. Moreover, we establish evaluation indices of power equality and power equity based on classic and variant Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves and use them to assess and compare the power structures of the BRICS’ NDB and CRA in the contexts of different voting weight reallocations and different voting rules redesigns. We use these indices to precisely analyse whether the power structures of the BRICS institutions become more equable or equitable in the examined contexts and to investigate the relationship between equality and equity in this setting. The highest equality but the lowest equity clearly results from the current equal‐weight system and consensus rule of the BRICS institutions. We question whether a better performance in terms of the equity of power distribution due to a decision‐making system redesign would help the BRICS’ NDB and CRA attract new members and perform better in the future.
As the first multilateral development bank (MDB) initiated by China, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has been growing rapidly, and within three years of its establishment, has become the second largest multilateral development bank after the World Bank. With the assistance of the supercomputer (Weiming‐1) and combing the method of generating functions, we measured precisely the voting power of each member of the AIIB (analysis which has been done for the first time for an organization with more than 80 members and more than 1 million distributed votes). We find that a host of member countries other than China have outsized power to prevent action on significant matters, but their power to initiate action are quite modest and closely distributed. Furthermore, the power structures in the AIIB are relatively even or ‘democratic’ on substantive matters when compared to procedural matters. More interestingly, we analyzed the dynamics of voting power of major members like China, India, Russia, Germany, the UK and France with the admission of new members. While the voting weights of all existing members decreased monotonously and proportionally, the voting power of some members in some cases even increased. We find that the requirements of voting rules, and the size of new and existing members, all affect how members’ power evolve. Lastly, we measured the balance of power and the decision‐making efficiency of the AIIB as a whole organization beyond individual members and discussed relationships between them. Our analysis aims to provide insights into the allocation of voting weights, the design of voting rules and importantly, the choice of membership expansions for growing multilateral development banks.
Global governance is widely perceived to be ‘gridlocked’, ‘unravelling’, and ‘unfit for purpose’. The legitimacy of old institutions is breaking down, yet new institutions struggle to establish themselves as viable alternatives. Though overlooked, global development governance is no exception. Heterogeneous development actors, approaches, and understandings increasingly characterize the field. However, attempts to create a common platform have foundered. This article contributes to a growing body of literature that depicts world order as a Gramscian ‘interregnum’ to account for the crisis facing global development. Its primary contribution lies in the examination of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation as a vantage point to explore the politics, dynamics and struggles over the means and ends of ‘development’ in the current conjuncture. Here, competing projects vie for influence, yet none command the support necessary to supplant the ‘old' order. Although this article finds that the condition of ‘interregnum’ will likely persist, it also explores what transformative elements of a possible future exist within present practices.
At a general level, the article focuses on the relationship between states and international organizations. In the current era, states and international organizations coexist in the international system. Their relation has been researched many times, but the question which is still rather unanswered relates to the management of membership of states in international organizations. The states nowadays participate in hundreds of different organizations. The tricky part that remains to be examined more in detail is how to analyze the effectiveness of the engagement of a country in a concrete international organization. The article investigates further the case of the Czech Republic and it analyses its performance and relevance in the European Defence Agency (EDA) applying the research design which was proposed in 2012 2. The team of researchers proposed four criteria: objective pursued, personal representation, cost/performance ratio, and activities implemented. The analysis is based on the examination of the Czech policy goals and priorities in the EDA. It also explores the area in more detail by conducting semi-structured interviews with the representatives of different Czech state bodies and employees of the Agency.
This paper seeks to explore whether the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has become an instrument of power led by China to fulfill her geopolitical interests. After an investigation of the AIIB’s power structure, institutional design, and its 34 approved projects, this study finds that although the AIIB deviates to some extent from international standards while considering loan decisions, the bank itself does not appear to be a norm challenger so far. Instead, it has become more cooperative and inclusive, with a shifting focus towards mutually beneficial cooperation and reform of the international financial system. This paper argues that the AIIB's current configuration results from the decrease in China’s status deficit—the gap between China’s recognized international financial status and its own perception of its financial power. Quantitative and qualitative evidence shows that when the idea of the AIIB was first conceived, China’s status deficit was large, which meant that in a global power struggle the AIIB was more likely to be manipulated by a dissatisfied China. As the AIIB evolved, China’s international financial status gained positive recognition and the AIIB received wider acceptance; China’s status deficit shrank. As a result, the AIIB has become a reform-minded multilateral financial institution that has made concessions to establish rules and has sought collaboration with its counterparts.
ABD önderliğinde, Bretton Woods Konferansı ile çoklu mutabakat sonrası kurulan Uluslararası Yeniden Yapılandırma ve Kalkınma Bankası (IBRD), ulusal ekonomilerin dışa kapanmayacağı bir uluslararası ekonomik sistemin varlığını sürdürmek üzere kurulan bir ulus üstü finans kurumudur. Kuruluşundan beri ABD etkisinde politika üreten, IBRD, 1960 yılında Uluslararası Kalkınma Birliği’nin (IDA) katılımı ile Dünya Bankası adını almıştır. 1980’lere kadar serbest piyasa ekonomisi içinde ulusların üretime dayalı kalkınmalarını destekleyerek, yoksulluğu ve azgelişmişliği çözmeye çalışan Banka, 1980’lerde, büyük bir değişim geçirmiştir. 1970’lerin sonuna kadar, kalkınma kavramının çekirdeğinde yer alan sosyal politika nosyonu, 1980’lerde unutulur ve kalkınmanın yerini ekonomik büyüme alır. Nihayet, 1990’ların başında sosyal politikalar, artan yoksulluğu dizginlemek üzere ekonomik büyümenin kolaylaştırıcıları haline gelmiştir. Ancak, hızlı innovasyon ve teknolojik gelişme üretim sistemlerine yansıyarak, çalışma ilişkilerinde yeni bir dönemi başlatmıştır. Gelişmiş ve gelişmekte olan ülkeler ile ABD’de imalat sanayi istihdam oranlarında azalış yaşanırken bilakis Çin’de nitelikli beşeri sermaye ile üretilen yeni işler imalat sanayi istihdamını artırmıştır. Banka, devletlerin serbest piyasa ekonomisi içinde gerek hızlı rekabete uyum sağlamaları gerekse orta sınıfın yok olmaması ve orta gelir tuzağına takılmaması için beşeri sermayenin önceliğini vurgular. Nitekim Banka, gelişmekte olan ülkelerin geleceğin ekonomisinde acımasız rekabet ile başaçıkabilmelerinin tek yolunu, minumum sosyal koruma ile teknolojinin faydalarından yararlanabilecek nitelikli beşeri sermaye olarak görmektedir.
The rise of China raises fundamental questions about the future of the liberal international order (LIO) at a time when it is under ever more strain. Although China's focus for some years was on joining and participating in existing multilateral institutions , today China is increasingly building its own. Prominent among them is the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), launched in late 2014. Against the background of contending theoretical expectations, this article examines the extent to which the AIIB either reinforces or challenges the LIO and highlights what this tells us about China's broader relationship with the LIO. We provide a definition of the LIO that is based on its social purpose rather than on its formal characteristics. State-centric approaches offer insights into China's decision to engage in new institution building via the AIIB, but we argue that a focus on social purpose is necessary to assess the AIIB's broader implications for the LIO. We find that, while conforming in large measure to existing institutional models, the AIIB promotes China's integration into global social networks, strengthens state-led development pathways, and is associated with the Chinese norm of non-interference. The AIIB, thus, foreshadows the possibility of an institutionalised international order indifferent to liberalism. In sum, the AIIB reflects the tensions between the socialising effects of the LIO and China's growing externalisation of its own non-liberal, state-led model of political economy.
The dominant international discourse about ‘fragile states’ calls for external actors to build the capacity of domestic institutions as a means of overcoming poverty and insecurity in the global South. It frames the pathway to greater peace and prosperity as primarily, if not entirely, domestically constituted, thereby confining the causes of poverty and insecurity to the domestic arena as well. This article argues that by focusing so intently on the domestic capacity of these states, international peace/state-building and development interventions discount, and thereby reinforce, non-domestic factors that impede security and development. These include: external support for repressive regimes; the sale of weapons to local actors; and the preservation of international trade arrangements implicated in sustaining global inequalities. This article argues that while each of these issues have greater levers for change in the North than in the South, they are generally excluded from discourses about overcoming poverty and insecurity. Therefore, if international actors are serious about attending to these issues, there are more pressing areas for reform than the internal institutional configurations of Southern states. Intervening in domestic institutions is, however, what development and state-building agencies are structured to do, meaning that to overhaul this mandate would directly challenge their existence.
The World Bank is the richest and largest development projects financial institution in the World. The Bank’s
central goal is that to reduce extreme poverty but its development policy is economic growth and depens on foreign
investment. It provide that the promotion of private foreign investment is the most important founding articles of the Bank
(articleii,IADB,1991). The Bank’s ability to obtain loanable funds at a low cost, provide its superiority of development
finance area. The Bank not to seem focused on promoting national capital for members country to development projects.
World Bank lending to developing countries that is both financial and intellectual hegemon. For that reason, The Bank’s
lending hegemony is further strengthened by is its reputation as a country-rating agency. Acting as “a kind of international
rating actors that signals to donors, potential lenders and investors in which countries they should put the money or foreign
capital investment inflow. The late 1990s, foreign direct investment flows have become a significant source to economic
growth for many developing countries. According to the World Bank, foreign investment and capital have played an
important role in economic development for developing countries. Thus, reducing poverty is the one of the primary goal for
the World Bank and the way of achieving this goal is that economic growth. The teory of economic growth in which base
on foreign capital is that, the single most important factor in poverty reduction. Besides all this, the Bank is considered
the most strong institution in economic development and poverty reduction but its original purpose to support foreign private
capital. Thus, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), which sells unsurance policies to private investors
against political risk to obtain investor confidence, fundamentally to sustain foreign capital investment and promote free
trade
This article analyses the World Bank’s environmental and social Safeguards against the backdrop of changing paradigms of global legal order. In January 2017, a new ‘Environmental and Social Framework’ (ESF) entered into force and replaced older ‘Safeguard Policies’ that had incrementally emerged since the 1980s in response to harmful impacts of investment projects financed by the Bank. The Safeguards reform epitomizes the changing structures and geopolitical shifts that shape international law in the twenty-first century and provides a fascinating looking glass on the evolution of global order since the end of the cold war. In this perspective, we see the first generation of Safeguards, introduced since the late 1980s, as an element of incremental legalization in the emerging global governance regime, a regime characterized by unipolar multilateralism and geopolitical dominance of ‘the West’. The 2016 reform not only reflects the increased politicization of global governance by civil society but also the emergence of a more competitive multilateralism, characterized by counter-institutionalization on the part of emerging powers like China. A comparison of the old and new Safeguards thus allows us to analyse different forms of contestation and resulting normative evolution in the key area of global governance of development and finance.
Over the past decade, rising authoritarian regimes have begun to challenge the liberal international order. This challenge is particularly pronounced in the field of multilateral development finance, where China and its coalition partners from Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa have created two new multilateral development banks. This article argues that China and its partners have used the New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to increase their power and to restrict democratic control mechanisms. By comparing formal mechanisms of democratic control in both organizations to the World Bank, this article shows that civil society access, transparency, and accountability are lower at the AIIB and NDB than they are at the World Bank.
Under what circumstances do international organizations change their operations and routines? Examining the recent Strategic Compact reform initiative, we argue that change in the World Bank is "triggered" by a complex set of factors stemming from changed interests and norms in the Bank's environment. The process of change, however, is something shaped by organizational culture, which is defined as the deeply embedded ideologies, norms, and routines that govern the expectations and behavior of bureaucratic staff. This organizational culture represents the internal friction that propels change in a slow, path-dependent direction that produces outcomes that are not necessarily congruent with the preferences of the organization's powerful shareholders or the intentions of internal reform initiators.
Many developing and transitional countries have grown faster than advanced countries in the past decade, resulting in a shift in the distribution of world income in their favor. China is now the second largest economy in the world, behind the United States and ahead of Japan. As the relative economic weight of China and several others has come to match or exceed that of the middle-ranking G7 economies, the world economy has shifted from “unipolar” toward “multipolar,” less dominated by the G7. How is this change being translated into changes in authority and influence within multilateral organizations like the G20, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)? Alarm bells are ringing in G7 capitals about G7 loss of influence. According to a WikiLeaks cable from the senior U.S. official for the G20 process, from January 2010, “It is remarkable how closely coordinated the BASIC group of countries [Brazil, South Africa, India, China] have become in international fora, taking turns to impede US/EU initiatives and playing the US and EU off against each other.”
This essay suggests that the shift in power is much smaller than the headlines or private alarm bells suggest. The United States remains the dominant state, and the G7 states together continue to exercise primacy, but now more fearfully and defensively. China is split between asserting itself as “the wave of the future” and defending itself as too poor to take on global responsibilities (it is roughly 100th in the per capita income hierarchy). The combination of G7 defensiveness and emerging states’ jealous guarding of sovereignty produces a spirit of Westphalian assertion in international fora, or “every state for itself.” On the assumption that the world economy is in a transitional period, the article suggests reforms in the G20 and the World Bank that would boost their role and legitimacy as multilateral organizations in a more multipolar world.
“The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy.”—from the Introduction The greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been as globalizers. But at whose cost? Would borrowing countries be better off without the IMF and World Bank? This book takes readers inside these institutions and the governments they work with. Ngaire Woods brilliantly decodes what they do and why they do it, using original research, extensive interviews carried out across many countries and institutions, and scholarship from the fields of economics, law, and politics. The Globalizers focuses on both the political context of IMF and World Bank actions and their impact on the countries in which they intervene. After describing the important debates between U.S. planners and the Allies in the 1944 foundation at Bretton Woods, she analyzes understandings of their missions over the last quarter century. She traces the impact of the Bank and the Fund in the recent economic history of Mexico, of post-Soviet Russia, and in the independent states of Africa. Woods concludes by proposing a range of reforms that would make the World Bank and the IMF more effective, equitable, and just.
The paper looks into the pitfalls and promise of double majority voting as one element of a comprehensive reform package to enhance the voice of developing countries and countries in transition in the governance structure of the World Bank. It is argued that in order to effectively fulfil a mandate that is dramatically different from the one envisaged when the World Bank was created, the Bank must refashion its decision-making structure. Since there are, however, tremendous obstacles and reservations to the introduction of double majority voting, notably the legal requirement to amend the Articles of Agreement of the World Bank, I argue that a two-year pilot phase approach should be pursued. This would leave time to inform others about the promise of the idea and to gather support from key constituencies. Very much like the Global Environmental Facility (GEF) in its initial phase, a pilot phase approach would lower the resistance against ‘definite’ commitments, while also leaving a chance for agreed upon revisions in the light of lessons learned after a defined number of years. Double majority voting is essentially a concept pioneered in the GEF over the last decade in the sense of a true North-South partnership. Ownership and ‘voice’ of all sides involved are an inbuilt feature of this innovative voting structure. Different stakeholders’ claims are appropriately respected, including donors without whom the GEF could not function and recipient countries whose cooperation and participation is required to enable the institution to achieve its objectives.
In the many studies of the World Bank a critical issue has been missed. While writers have looked at the Bank's political economy, lending, conditions, advice, ownership and accounting for issues such as the environment, this study looks at the Bank as an organization - whether it is set up to do the job it is supposed to do and, if not, what should be done about it. The book is about the problems of organization and reorganization as much as it is about the problems of assisting third-world development, and it is a case study in flawed organizational reform as much as a critique of the way development assistance is managed. It covers the period that starts at the time of the first major reorganization, in 1987 under President Barber Conable, and ends at the time of the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz, in 2007, but it focuses especially on what happened during the tenure of James Wolfensohn.
The World Bank's outdated financial structure is a threat to its continued relevance. Paul Wolfowitz, the bank's new president, should begin closing the wing of the bank that lends to middle-income countries.
The literature on international network governance commonly presumes an ‘effectiveness‐legitimacy dilemma’: gains in effectiveness at problem solving, perhaps via smaller size, come at cost to legitimacy, because the smaller the network the more those expected to comply with network decisions are excluded and are therefore less likely to accept network decisions; and gains in legitimacy come at cost to effectiveness, perhaps because of more diversity of interests. In the case of the G20, however, the dilemma breaks down, because the G20 scores low on both effectiveness and legitimacy. In this article we present a design for a new global economic governance body, based on explicit membership criteria (as the G20 is not), in the form of a modified version of the Bretton Woods (World Bank and IMF) governance arrangement. The proposed new Global Economic Council (GEC), operating at heads of government level and below, would likely bring substantial gains in both effectiveness and legitimacy.
Policy Implications
A more legitimate global economic governance body should be created not by tweaking the existing G20 but by starting from the constituency system of the Bretton Woods organizations and modifying it to make it more equitably representative. Then the newly established GEC, the World Bank and the IMF would have the same constituencies.
The GEC should have 25 seats, 16 of which are to be allocated among four regions: Africa, Americas, Asia and Europe. The remaining nine seats should be allocated on the basis of economic weight (GDP). Allocating two thirds of the seats on a regional basis sends an important signal of the new multipolar order.
The legitimacy problems of the Bretton Woods institutions resulting from their continuing voting power imbalances should be addressed by reforming their voting power systems so as to reflect only relative economic weight (as measured by GDP).
The GEC should exercise strategic oversight over the Bretton Woods organizations, and possibly beyond to other economic and social agencies of the United Nations system. It might be responsible for appointing their heads.
Much has been said about the failing policies of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In this essay, I attempt to explain why the IMF has pursued policies that in many cases not only failed to promote the stated objectives of enhancing growth and stability, but were probably counterproductive and even flew in the face of a considerable body of theoretical and empirical work that suggested these poilcies would be counterproductive. I argue that the root of the problem lies in the IMF's system of governance. Thereafter, I discuss how the World Bank managed to reform its agenda in order to fulfill its goals of poverty reduction more successfully, and what lessons this reform holds for the IMF. I conclude by proposing needed reforms for the IMF that might mitigate some of the problems it has encountered in the past.1
Over the last decade, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have embraced “good governance” as a set of principles to guide their objectives in member countries. Both institutions now face pressures to apply some similar standards of transparency, accountability and participation to themselves. This paper examines the challenges this poses for the organizations, beyond the steps they have already undertaken to disseminate more information and to enhance their relations with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The paper argues that if “good governance” is to be furthered within the IMF and the World Bank, then changes in their constitutional rules, their balancing of stakeholders' rights, their decision-making rules and practices, and their staffing and expertise need to be considered.
The main aim of this paper is to study the power of legislators in the Lower House of the Czech Parliament in 1996–2004 with respect to power distribution and its uncertainty. A discrepancy between a-priori computed power indices and outcome of voting leads to necessity to reveal the possible source of uncertainty. This paper studies uncertainty in party loyalty, presence and creation of hidden coalitions and explains the addition of these uncertainty issues to computation of power indices. Recalculated power indices exhibit positive improvement.
Analysis of World Bank voting reforms: Governance remains illegitimate and outdated
- A Horton
Horton, A. (2010). Analysis of World Bank voting reforms: Governance remains illegitimate and outdated. London: The Bretton Woods Project.
Taking stock of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings: G-20 here to stay Toward a grand bargain on World Bank reform
- D Lombardi
Lombardi, D. (2010). Taking stock of the IMF and World Bank spring meetings: G-20 here to stay?. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution. Martinez-Diaz, L. (2009). Toward a grand bargain on World Bank reform. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution.
Reforming the World Bank: Twenty years of trial – and error Governing Europe. Effective or democratic?
- D A Phillips
Phillips, D. A. (2009). Reforming the World Bank: Twenty years of trial – and error. New York: Cambridge University Press. Scharpf, F. W. (1999). Governing Europe. Effective or democratic?. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Monterrey consensus on financing for development
- Protecting Power
- How
- States Retain The Dominant Voice In The World Bank 's
- Governance
- Un
PROTECTING POWER: HOW WESTERN STATES RETAIN THE DOMINANT VOICE IN THE WORLD BANK'S GOVERNANCE 163 UN (2003). Monterrey consensus on financing for development. Geneva: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations.
The World Bank and the emerging world order: Adjusting to multipolarity at the second decimal point
- J Vestergaard
Vestergaard, J. (2011). The World Bank and the emerging world order: Adjusting to multipolarity at the second decimal point. DIIS report 2011:5. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies.
Adjusting to multipolarity in the World Bank: Ducking and diving, wriggling and squirming
- J Vestergaard
- R Wade
Vestergaard, J., & Wade, R. (2011). Adjusting to multipolarity in the World Bank: Ducking and diving, wriggling and squirming. DIIS Working Paper 2011:24. Copenhagen: Danish Institute for Interna-tional Studies.
From intervention to cooperation: Reforming the IMF and World Bank
- N Woods
Woods, N. (2008a). From intervention to cooperation: Reforming the IMF and World Bank. Progressive governance, London.
IMF voting reform: Need, opportunity and options. G24 Discussion Paper Series Geneva: United Nations Inside the World Bank Exploding the myth of the monolithic Bank Empowering the World Bank for the 21st century. Report of the High-Level Commission on Modernization of World Bank Group Governance
- D Woodward
- X Yi-Chong
- P Weller
Woodward, D. (2007). IMF voting reform: Need, opportunity and options. G24 Discussion Paper Series, No. 49, December 2007. Geneva: United Nations. Yi-Chong, X., & Weller, P. (2009). Inside the World Bank. Exploding the myth of the monolithic Bank. Palgrave Macmillan. Zedillo Commission (2009). Empowering the World Bank for the 21st century. Report of the High-Level Commission on Modernization of World Bank Group Governance. Washington, DC: The World Bank.
The end of the third world? Address to Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars
- R Zoellick
Zoellick, R. (2010). The end of the third world? Address to Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, Washington. DC, 14 April.