A weak case for World Bank irrelevance

Writing in the Financial Times, Oxford scholar Ian Goldin contends that the World Bank is in danger of becoming irrelevant: By the time the leadership is opened to a genuine contest, the Bank could have become irrelevant. The development of global capital markets and a network of national and regional development institutions, as well as ...

By , a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies.

Writing in the Financial Times, Oxford scholar Ian Goldin contends that the World Bank is in danger of becoming irrelevant:

Writing in the Financial Times, Oxford scholar Ian Goldin contends that the World Bank is in danger of becoming irrelevant:

By the time the leadership is opened to a genuine contest, the Bank could have become irrelevant. The development of global capital markets and a network of national and regional development institutions, as well as a vibrant global scholarly and policy community to give expert advice, is rendering it marginal to all but the poorest countries.

This argument would have been much stronger before the financial crisis. Back then, it really did look like the Bank had been displaced by capital markets, at least as far as creditworthy countries were concerned. Why borrow from the Bank, with all its nettlesome conditions and monitoring, when you can go to the markets? But for the last several years, lending by the Bank arm devoted to middle-income countries–the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development–has been much higher than average, and 2010 was a record year. There’s nothing mysterious about this pattern: when economic times are tight, the Bank looks much more attractive.

David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist

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