A critical review of the World Bank’s stance on poverty reduction

Author(s):  
Jean-Pierre Cling
Author(s):  
Olga Pryazhnikova ◽  

The World Bank has made an important contribution to shaping the global agenda for reducing poverty, increasing prosperity and promoting sustainable development. The review examines the main milestones in changes of the World Bank’s activities in the field of social development. The evolution of the organization’s approaches to solving the problem of poverty reduction as one of the key obstacles to socio-economic development is outlined.


2020 ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Constantine Michalopoulos

The collaboration the U4 launched at Utstein covered a wide variety of development issues handled by different international institutions. This involved in the first place coordination of their positions at the World Bank and the IMF, and the UN and its funds, programmes, and agencies. The World/Bank IMF were very important both because of the size and extent of their own programmes but also for helping developing countries manage the overall poverty reduction strategies within which all bilateral aid was supposed to fit. Increasing the effectiveness of bilateral aid could only succeed if it were part of a consistent overarching multilateral effort. This chapter starts with a discussion of U4 efforts to ensure that the poverty reduction strategies developed with the help of the World Bank/IMF in connection with debt relief actually reflected developing country priorities. It then moves on to U4’s efforts to improve the effectiveness of UN programmes which tended to be characterized by fragmentation and inefficiencies. The last part addresses the problem of coherence and collaboration between the IMF and the World Bank—the international financial institutions, on the one hand, and the UN and its agencies, on the other.


2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Toye

The production of social knowledge in all international organizations is problematic because all are public bureaucracies. The World Bank provides a case study of the problems of managing in-house research in an international public bureaucracy. Not only are there managerial constraints on what the Bank is willing to publish, but the binding constraints on publication evolve. The evolution in managerial objectives at the Bank in recent years and the factors that have influenced shifts in its rhetoric and policy are examined. Are these adjustments merely rhetorical? Recent research on poverty reduction, governance and conditionality is discussed to gauge how far the Bank has moved.


1997 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-45 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas H. Moller

The World Bank group has been criticised by a wide variety of groups over the years for its failure to adequately take into account human rights and democratic principles. Recently, the Bank has started to widen the scope of its activities so that now the Bank is involved in projects concerned with such disparate issues as the environment, poverty reduction and women in development. This paper focuses on one of the new Bank concerns, governance, and examines the prospects it holds for ensuring that the Bank and its borrower-countries respect human rights and democratic values. It then reviews the responses governance has received and suggests alternative means that may more effectively ensure that the Bank takes into account such values. Finally, the paper proposes a new test, based on Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to be applied to potential borrowers and the test is applied to Burma.


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