The World Bank and Governance : The Bank’s Efforts to Help Developing Countries Build State Capacity
This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an ef...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2012/11/16985782/world-bank-governance-banks-efforts-help-developing-countries-build-state-capacity http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12112 |
| Summary: | This paper examines historically the
World Bank's twin features: lending to developing
economies to achieve tangible results and advocating
specific development policies. Section 1 provides some
conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective
state is essential for development. It asks whether
development can be engineered, and state capacity increased,
with large aid flows. Section 2 sketches the historical
evolution of what characterizes the World Bank: lending to
developing economies and advocacy of development policy. It
concludes that, while the Bank discourse explicitly
recognizes that developing countries need to improve their
governance and build the capacity of the public sector to
improve living standards, the Bank's performance in
assisting governments in building state capacity and
achieving better governance outcomes has been disappointing.
Section 3 proposes an interpretation of why this has been
the case. The interpretation is structural, and related to
the way the Bank is organized. This concerns in particular
(1) how its research is prioritized and used for
decision-making, (2) how its leadership achieves a consensus
between shareholders who hold different views on the role of
government in the economy, and (3) how incentives for its
staff emphasize disbursement and short-term success, and not
capacity building and longer-term institutional sustainability. |
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