Reforming the World Bank
Twenty Years of Trial - and Error

This book explains why the World Bank has not achieved substantive efficiency or effectiveness in delivering economic assistance.

David A. Phillips (Author)

9780521883054, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 March 2009

342 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.2 cm, 0.59 kg

'This book shows how reform often comes out of episodic initiatives and how new solutions often consist simply in reversing what was done earlier.' Michele Alacevich, Harvard University

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. This 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.

Part I. Origins and Evolution: 1. What does the World Bank do and how does it do it?
2. The emerging critique
Part II. The Search for Effectiveness: 3. Fifty years of bank reforms
4. The 1990s - reengineering the organization
5. Changing culture and changing people
6. Reforming the bank's assistance product
7. Changing the quality of development assistance
8. Financing the reorganization
9. Why did the reforms fail?
Part III. Towards Real Reform: The Governance Agenda: 10. The governors and the directors
11. The leadership
12. Looking back and looking forward: what is to be done?

Subject Areas: Business & management [KJ], Political economy [KCP], Development economics & emerging economies [KCM], Economic growth [KCG], Economics [KC]