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Using History to Inform
Development Policy
The Role of Archives
Workshop Summary
October 25–26, 2012
The World Bank
Washington, DC
Using History to Inform
Development Policy
The Role of Archives
Workshop Summary
October 25–26, 2012
The World Bank
Washington, DC
© 2013 International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank
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Foreword v
Preface vii
Introductory Comments
Facilitating Research by Broadening Access to the Past
Delivering Results by Harnessing Knowledge
Legal Interpretation at the World Bank: Learning from History to Help Shape the Future
Keynote Address
Glance Back, Drive Forward: Reflections on the World Bank's History
Session 1—From Bank to Development Agency: Implications for the World Bank's
Mission, Governance, and Policy
American Politics, the Presidency of the World Bank, and Development Policy
Not a Knowledge Bank: Economic Research at the World Bank in the Early 1950s
The World Bank and Governance: The Bank's Efforts to Help Build State Capacity
Session 2—Constructive World Bank–Client Partnerships: Three Case Studies
The Role of the World Bank Group Archives in Research: Finding the Tipping Point in
Economic Ideas in India
A Constructive Partnership: The World Bank and the Republic of Korea Early in the
Country's Economic Takeoff
Urban Development in Cairo, 1976–93: The Perils of
"Everyday State Building" in the Arab Republic of Egypt
Session 3—Dialogues of Development: Past Contestations, Present Policy
Before Social Capital: The Forgotten History of Community Development in the Cold War Era 28
History, Historians, and Development Debates: Using the World Bank's Archives to
Address Five Key Issues
Archival Research as Unfinished Business
Session 4—The Role of Archives in International Organizations
The World Bank's Archives: 60 Years of Development Knowledge on the "Science of Delivery" 36
The International Monetary Fund's Archives for Economic Research
Archives of Development in the United Nations Secretariat: Murky Past, Unclear Future
Session 5—Exploring Archives on the Role of Development Practitioners: Africa
United Nations Economic and Technical Assistance during the Congo Crisis, 1960–64
Translating Theory into Practice: The World Bank's Economic Advisers in Ghana, 1960–85
History, Archives, and Development Policy in Africa
From Parliamentary Accountability to Records
Management: The Decline of Archival Authority in
20th-Century South Africa
Session 6—The United Kingdom, the United States, and the World Bank's
Development Policy
The Archival History of Britain and Its Dialogue with Development Policy during the World
Bank Era, circa 1945 to the Present
What the Developing World Can Learn from the Economic History of the United States—
and Vice Versa
Session 7—Sailing Back to the Future: History and Policy Making at the World Bank 57
History and Policy Making at the World Bank: The Evolving Approach to Governance Issues 58
The International Development Association and Debt Relief
The World Bank's Mediation of Disputes
Closing Remarks
All of us recognize the importance and the power of open
information, accountability and citizen-participation for effective
development. At the World Bank, we believe that transparency
and accountability are essential to the development process
and central to achieving the Bank's mission of ending extreme
poverty and boosting shared prosperity.
In October 2012, the Bank organized a workshop on the
role of archives in using history to inform development policy. It linked the growing scholarly interest in the history of
development with the Bank's Open Agenda Initiative and the
new openness resulting from our 2010 Access to Information
Policy. The workshop assembled scholars who demonstrated
the possibilities for bringing historical approaches to bear on
the practices and ideas of international financial institutions
and international development agencies.
This publication is a result of that workshop—which was
centered on three main themes: the early years of the Bank
and the evolution of its ideas and practices; Bank-client relationships, including both lending and advice on development
policy; and the influence of donors and shareholders on the
thinking and practices of the Bank.
The Bank's Archives are a global resource, both geographically (spanning all 6 regions of the globe) and
over time, capturing development work over 60 years. They reflect both our successes and our failures.
Thanks to the Open Agenda initiative and the Access to Information Policy, the World Bank's vast collection
of archival material—dating back to its inception in the 1940s—offers new potential for bringing historical
research to bear on development policies and practice. In effect, we have handed over the keys to the
World Bank's knowledge vault. You can access this 'vault' through the Bank's website or by contacting
the archivists to tap their knowledge of the vast collection of records, oral histories, photographs and
other materials that have not yet been digitized but which contain significant information for research.
By providing the infrastructure to share and protect our history, the Bank and its Archives ensure
that our work will be available for future generations. I hope you enjoy the summaries in this publication
and that they will inspire you to do your own research into the history of development policy.
Caroline Anstey
Managing Director
The World Bank Group
The front lines of development circle the globe. The people working
tirelessly on those front lines need access to information—and that
information needs to be delivered swiftly and securely. The World
Bank Group is working to offer better, faster, and easier access to
our information, in part by continuing to invest heavily in providing
electronic access.
The World Bank Group's archives are an enormous resource,
but for too long they have been underused—by Bank staff, external
researchers, and the general public. I am excited to share the news
that to improve access to this resource, containing more than 60 years
of development history, we are embarking on a project to digitize our
records and make them available on our website. Our plan is to start
with some of the most important records of the Bank, including records that show the history of who
we have been and who we are. We also want to share records that highlight how we work and what we
have learned from our partners as well as our critics. As we develop a body of digitized records, I hope
that you will take advantage of these first offerings.
Digitizing the archives is one more way of making the World Bank Group's information accessible. The
knowledge stored in our archives—especially the lessons that can be learned from both our successes
and our failures—is an untapped resource that I believe can play an influential role in future development policy. We need to continue working to ensure that our information gets into the hands of those
who are working on the front lines of development to improve the lives of the world's poorest people.
Stephanie von Friedeburg
Chief Information Officer and Vice President of
Information and Technology Solutions
The World Bank Group
Introductory Comments
Facilitating Research by Broadening Access to the Past
We archivists are the facilitators of research. We
have no opinion on the direction that the research
takes or the conclusions that are reached. We
want to make sure that the records are available
to the greatest extent possible while protecting
the legitimate needs for personal privacy and corporate confidentiality. The Access to Information
Policy adopted by the Bank in 2010 has been an
enormous step forward for us, as we are now able
to make available millions of items that had not
been available before.
Now we are taking the next step and making
more and more of the records of the past available online. For many years we have made formal,
final documents available through our Imagebank
service, documents accessed by millions of people every month. But now we are going back to
digitize key series of records from the archives
that will provide the color and rich deliberations
behind those formal documents. We are beginning
with the records of President Robert McNamara,
putting them online to allow researchers to look at
the remarkable era of his World Bank presidency.
History matters—as a method, as a discipline,
and as a perspective. Archives matter too. The
value of archives is richly evident in this booklet,
which provides a glimpse of the presentations at
an October 2012 workshop sponsored by the World
Bank Group Archives, the Development Economics
Vice Presidency, and the Legal Vice Presidency.
The workshop grew out of a panel discussion
organized by Giovanni Zanalda, a historian at
Duke University, at the 2011 annual meeting of
the Southern Economic Association to consider
In an October 2012 speech to the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, World Bank President Jim
Yong Kim asked, "What kind of knowledge do we
want?" In answering this question, he announced
plans for "knowledge hubs for development" to
enable findings on development—both successes and failures—to be widely shared. The World
Bank Group Archives is thrilled to be part of this
thrust to use information about the past to inform
the future. As President Kim said in Seoul, "The
Bank serves its partners by doing something
that none of them can do in isolation: creating
knowledge-related global public goods that support
shared learning processes at global, regional,
national, and subnational levels."
The archives of the institutions that make up
the World Bank Group hold massive historical
records extending from 1944 and the Bretton
Woods conference to today. These records show
many successes in the work by Bank staff and
their country counterparts to improve people's
lives. They also show failures, and studying those
failures allows us to learn if we will.
President Kim proposes building a library of
delivery case studies and using these as a resource
for training Bank staff, country partners, and anyone
else who wants to learn the lessons of the past.
Archives can contribute by making this knowledge
available and bringing in the crucial dimension of
time. Change, like success and failure, has many
causes, and using archives enables researchers
to tease apart the threads of the causes and
understand the complexity of the decisions made
by development professionals in the past.
the role of history in promoting development. The
success of that panel, linked to President Kim's
interest in case studies, encouraged us to more
fully explore the evidence base in archives that
researchers can draw on to analyze development.
We have chosen to reprint the keynote address
in full but to provide only summaries of the other
papers, which we hope the authors will publish in
journals of their choice. An illustration from the
World Bank Group's archives accompanies each
entry. While we emphasize the resources in the
World Bank Group's archives, we also point to the
important archival holdings of our sister institutions
the International Monetary Fund and the United
Nations as well as many other archives around the
world. We hope that by offering this small sample of
the archives' holdings and the important research
they can support, we will encourage researchers
from many disciplines to use the evidence that
the archives preserve.
A final word of thanks to a few people who
made the workshop possible through their constant support and guidance: Jean-Jacques Dethier in the World Bank's research department for
sharing his knowledge and believing in archives
and history; Michael Woolcock, also in the World
Bank's research department, for fostering the
dialogue between history—the past and the discipline—and development policy; Hassane Cissé
in the Bank's legal department for his openness
to looking at the past as a driver of innovative,
evidence-based decision making; Giovanni Zanalda
at Duke University for advice, hands-on work, and
encouragement throughout the process; Trudy
Peterson, who inspires the work of the World Bank
Group Archives team every day with her years of
leadership at the National Archives of the United
States, the Open Society Archives, and the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Archives
and with her contribution to building and preserving
Truth Commissions archives to keep the evidence
alive for the rights of people; and Denis Robitaille,
the Bank's Chief Information Officer for Operations
and Knowledge, for believing in this unusual project
and never letting us down. Without the skilled and
dedicated work of Gale King and the knowledge
and dedication of staff in the World Bank Group
Library & Archives of Development, neither the
workshop nor this publication would have seen
the light.
Elisa Liberatori Prati
Chief Archivist
The World Bank Group
Delivering Results by Harnessing Knowledge
field of delivery science, the World Bank Group
will help its partners learn from one another and
maximize the impact of every dollar spent to end
poverty and promote shared prosperity. Because
of its convening power and amassed knowledge
on what works and what does not, the World Bank
Group can make huge strides in delivering results.
Understanding development successes and
failures is essential in this process, and this is
where the role of the World Bank Group's archives
becomes important. The World Bank influences
development through its projects and through the
policies that it advocates, and mining the archives
is critical in better understanding the role of specific
ideas and technical solutions promoted by the
Bank—and where and why they have succeeded
or failed. The number of issues to consider is
almost as vast as the dimensions of development.
Providing professional researchers access to
the archives can generate new ideas and new ways
to look at problems, benefiting the entire development community. Good examples include Jeremy
Adelman's recent biography of Albert Hirschman
and Michele Alacevich's study of the Currie Mission
in Colombia and the early years of the World Bank;
the work of economists looking at time series
of agricultural prices, fuel prices, or exchange
rates over long periods under different fiscal and
monetary regimes; and the work of economists,
anthropologists, or historians on the Narmada Dam
in India, on the effectiveness of conditionality, or
on resettlement policy in Indonesia.
This is why the Development Economics Vice
Presidency is proud to partner with the World
Bank Group Archives in initiatives to explore the
historical evidence based in archives—evidence
that researchers can draw on to better understand
development policy.
Despite periodic global imbalances and supply
shocks, the world has seen big improvements in
living standards and a sharp decline in poverty
since the 1990s thanks to the economic performance of such countries as China, India, Brazil,
and Indonesia. With ample global liquidity and low
interest rates fueling strong global growth, many
client countries have found themselves in less
need of World Bank Group financing. But these
countries have maintained, to varying degrees,
active partnerships with the World Bank based on
analytical and advisory activities. Indeed, World
Bank partnerships have consistently evolved
toward more such activities even as lending to
many middle-income and all low-income client
countries continues.
The World Bank has been cognizant since the
late 1990s of the key role of knowledge for development and the need to rebalance its services by
shifting away from a predominant focus on lending
toward more effective use of country experiences
and global knowledge to meet client needs. The
Bank started repositioning in 1997 and was reorganized in a matrix management system—seen as
a more effective means of leveraging the Bank's
global knowledge, its technical sector know-how,
and its country-specific expertise from lending
and policy advice.
To improve its agility in capturing and sharing
the knowledge embedded in its lending services,
the World Bank Group has now embarked on
major reforms, known collectively by the phrase
"mastering the science of delivery," introduced by
President Jim Yong Kim. These include developing
ways to track progress and measure success and
establishing routines and crisis management
approaches in order to transform the Bank into
a "solutions bank." In advancing the emerging
Jean-Jacques Dethier
Research Manager, Development Economics
The World Bank
Legal Interpretation at the World Bank: Learning from History to Help Shape
the Future
With every new legal issue that is addressed in
the course of the Bank's development work, the
Bank's body of law expands.
The history of the creation of this sui generis
legal system, and therefore the existence of the
system itself, depends greatly for its preservation
on the work of the World Bank's archivists. The
World Bank is the custodian of its own history. As
the presentations summarized here demonstrate,
it is to the archives that the Bank's lawyers must
go when they are asked to help address complex
legal challenges in Bank operations. All the
legal opinions issued by successive World Bank
general counsels are based on a rigorous study
and analysis of history and legal precedents in
the Bank. Whether dealing with the issues of
governance, anticorruption, debt relief, criminal
justice, anti–money laundering, or postconflict
reconstruction, these opinions referred to history
to better understand the present and help chart
a sound new course for the future. International
development is an immensely complex field
that constantly presents new challenges and
lessons that must be recorded if the Bank and the
development community are to learn from them.
As lawyers in the Bank, we are heavy users of
the archives and happy to partner with the World
Bank Group Archives to raise awareness of this
important resource for development knowledge
and solutions.
Any modern system of law with claims to legitimacy
depends critically on access to its own recorded
history. If law is to be respected, it cannot be
conjured out of thin air. Rather, it must evolve in a
principled fashion in reference to its own history.
A lawyer identifies what the law is, or what it will
become or should be, through a deep understanding of all the law that has come before. That is
the essence of the familiar doctrine of precedent.
Most of this history exists as words, in one form
or another. Despite all the tremendous advances
in digital technology, the business of law will never
stop being about words, because so much of law's
history exists solely as words: words scratched,
written, typed, or uploaded on cave walls, tablets,
paper, or the digital cloud. The preservation of these
words, in the form of archives, is fundamental to
the legitimacy and operation of the law.
This is true of any modern legal system, but all
the more so in the case of the World Bank. The
World Bank as an institution exists in a unique
legal universe that has been shaped by the need
to interpret the Bank's Articles of Agreement and
understand the scope of its mandate and mission
in a changing world. The role of the Bank's lawyers
is to develop sound legal solutions to enable the
institution to successfully respond to the evolving
needs of its members and address new challenges
in a way that remains true to its Articles of Agreement and to general principles of international law.
Hassane Cissé
Deputy General Counsel, Knowledge and Research
Legal Vice Presidency, The World Bank
Keynote Address
Glance Back, Drive Forward: Reflections on the World Bank's History
Devesh Kapur
Madan Lal Sobti Associate Professor for the Study of Contemporary India and Director,
Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania
In a sense, the history of changing ideas
of development is most encapsulated
and embodied in the history of the World
Bank itself
less prudent than my
coauthors, unwisely
went through each of
the 10 innovations
and how and when
the Bank had already
tried them and with
what consequences
. . . at which point
the interview was
over and we left.
What that experience taught me
is that by definition
everything is innovative if there is no history. Without
history, there is no past; everything is new.
I have to confess that writing the Bank's history
was personally expensive for all of us. We weren't
paid in the last year and it was financially hard. But
I have to say that it was the most fabulous intellectual experience anyone could have. Especially for
me, as a young scholar starting off in his career,
writing the Bank's history was like being a kid in a
candy store. The sheer intellectual range—issue
areas, countries, people whom one got to meet and
interview, talk to, read about—was unparalleled, and
I would never exchange that experience for anything.
The title of this talk relates to one of my first interviews with former World Bank president Robert
McNamara, conducted for the book The World Bank:
Its First Half Century (Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution Press, 1997). My coauthors and I were
asking him about various incidents, and he would
spend barely a minute on our question and then
shift the topic to what he was doing then, such as
agricultural development in Africa (his passion at
the time).
Reflecting on this, one of my coauthors, John
P. Lewis (who had briefly served with McNamara
in the Kennedy administration), remarked that if
McNamara were to drive a car, he would almost
never look back through the rearview mirror.
A few years later, as we were nearing completion
of the book, a new president of the World Bank
came in and he invited us to his house. He said
that he wanted to learn from the history. So we
went there, and as soon as we sat down he said,
"Well, let me tell you the 10 things I'm going to do,
all these innovations." So he went through the 10.
I, being much younger then and therefore much
I owe a deep debt of gratitude to many people in
the Bank—and to its archives (and archivists) and
a small treasure-house few people have access to,
the Executive Directors' Library, which also houses
the transcripts of all the Board meetings. I still have
warm memories of that archival experience. Some of
you who are older might remember a person called
Ernie Stern—perhaps one of the most powerful
senior managers in the Bank's history. I must have
read around 24,000 memos by Ernie Stern alone.
And I have to say that if you ever want to teach
participants in the Bank's Young Professionals
Program how to write concisely and precisely—and
sometimes with brutal frankness—get them to read
his memos. For me, reading those memos was a
wonderful way to learn about what was happening
around the world—and in the Bank.
from capital markets, from a low- or middle-income
borrower, or from a major nonborrowing shareholder.
I have to say that the attempt was not very successful—in part because many of the authors had
little access to related historical records on their
end—and we had to put in a lot of effort to improve
many of those papers.
That experience taught me two lessons: First,
just because someone is a big name does not
mean that that person can write thoughtful and
well-researched papers. And second, the history of
the development of many countries is better found
in the archives of the Bank than in the countries
themselves. The second fact should not be forgotten, for it tells how records are kept by countries
themselves, how they think about their own histories.
Unlike for the first Bank history, in this case
there was consensus that one of the authors
should come from a developing country. Originally,
the current prime minister of India, Manmohan
Singh, was considered as a coauthor along with
John P. Lewis, a Princeton University professor who
had a long and distinguished career in the development field, especially in South Asia. The Bank,
however, made the point that the expertise of both
prospective authors was in South Asia and a more
diversified expertise might be better. So Richard
Webb, who had been the governor of the Central
Bank of Peru and had worked at the World Bank in
the 1970s, became the second coauthor. I joined
as the head of research and gradually became the
third coauthor. So that is the background on how I
got involved in the project.
Demystifying the Bank
What I wanted to share with you is what we sought
to do in writing the Bank's history and my reflections
on the broad themes, the principal threads as it
were, of that history. I think first of all we wanted
to demystify the Bank, in the sense of just laying it
open more, especially to developing countries. Much
to our regret, despite all the efforts and resources
that went into writing the Bank's history, for many
years the book was virtually invisible. It was reviewed
almost nowhere. We wanted to have it translated
and brought out in cheap editions in the languages
of the developing countries. That was the way to
empower them, not by having it circulate in a very
expensive edition that hardly anyone could afford.
But that did not happen. Fortunately, now it is freely
available on the web.
We also wanted to have a sense of what the Bank
meant for its principal stakeholders—the borrowers
and major shareholders. So we put together a parallel volume that looked at aspects of the Bank's
history from specific vantage points. Indeed, the
usual parallel when we think about history is the
Rashomon analogy that there is a subjectivity of
perception depending on one's vantage point. To
this end we invited various well-known people to
write papers on different subjects, whether a view
A History of Ideas
If we ask ourselves what the big themes of this history are, I think the fundamental guiding principle,
what we sought to write about in this history, was
a history of ideas—the ideas that have shaped
development. In a sense, the history of changing
ideas of development is most encapsulated and
embodied in the history of the World Bank itself.
What struck me then—and continues to strike me
now—is how strongly the Bank, and the ideas that
have shaped it, are rooted in and influenced by the
that it is necessary to work with the countries first,
and then with people.
This tension around sovereignty has also been
reflected in perennial debates on governance and
lending. Poorly governed countries are less deserving
of Bank lending, but the people of the same countries
are in greater need of lending—precisely because
they need help to counter the adverse effects of
poor governance. But more lending might simply
be pouring water onto sand.
Anglo-Saxon world, whether through language or
the enormous influence that university economics departments, especially in the northeastern
United States, have always had and continue to
have on the Bank.
In the 1950s planning (and planning models)
was the flavor of the day among academics in
the economics departments of elite northeastern
universities (and in the United Kingdom). A quarter
century later the same elite northeastern universities said what a terrible idea it was. If the Harvards
and MITs were pushing planning in the Bank in the
1950s—fast-forward to 60 years later, the same
small set of elite universities is shaping the latest
new ideas (or fads, depending on one's point of
view), such as randomized trials. In between there
have been social cost-benefit analysis, general equilibrium models, cross-country regressions—ideas
that have modest half-lives, alive only until they are
pushed aside by the next set of ideas, all of which
are as much about the incentives of academia as
they are about development.
Make no mistake; I am not putting a value judgment on the interplay of ideas between academia
and the World Bank. That's just the way it was.
And I do believe that it continues to be like that,
for better and for worse.
In the history of ideas, one of the things you
see, then and now, is a perennial tension that the
Bank has faced with respect to development: is it
about people or countries? A poignant example is
a personal memo that World Bank President Barber
Conable wrote to then chief economist Stan Fischer,
after returning from a trip to Africa that included a
visit to a country in the Sahel. In the memo Conable
said that this country was a giant sandbox—what
could the Bank do there? Indeed, one could argue
that the best thing the Bank could have done
there was to give everyone in that country a oneway ticket out of it. And herein lies the problem.
Should the Bank care about a country or about the
well-being of the people of that country, whether
they live there or somewhere else? But of course
the structure of international organizations is such
The Context Shaping the History
A second thread that runs through the Bank's
history (and that was bypassed in the first official
history of the Bank) is just how much its history
until the late 1980s was shaped by the Cold War.
This fact comes out repeatedly through that history.
The person who really made the Bank in a sense,
its second president, John McCloy, was serving as
president of the Bank at the same time that he was
also engaged in laying the foundations for the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency. Now that's a very interesting juxtaposition—something that would become
impossible in later years. But it shows that in the
Bank's early years the relationship for those at the
top was seamless, and certainly the relationship
between which countries to favor in lending and
which not to was very much shaped by the Cold
War–driven geopolitics. Given that relationship, it
is not surprising that Keynes was insistent that the
Bank not be located in Washington. He wanted it to
be located in New York, believing that Wall Street's
influence could be leveraged to counter political
pressures from Washington, because he knew that
location mattered and that the location would also
shape influence.
If one looks back at the Bank's lending in the
1950s, it was directed almost entirely to the rim
countries around the Soviet Union. Only after Castro
came to power in 1959 did the Bank really begin to
focus on Latin America. It made almost no loans to
the region in the 1950s. In the 1970s, as the Cold
War shifted to Africa, the Bank steered its course
accordingly. This, of course, was valid only until
the end of the Cold War, but I think that it certainly
affected the DNA of the institution.
The other part of the context that has shaped
the Bank is the nature of the competition that it has
faced. This began with the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development—IBRD. The R was
dropped almost immediately, as soon as competition
from the Marshall Plan drove the Bank out of the
business of reconstruction in war-ravaged Europe.
In the 1950s the biggest potential competitor was
the U.S. Ex-Im Bank, and the Bank's management
lobbied hard to try and shut it down. In the same
decade the Bank also lobbied hard against the
creation of IDA (the International Development
Association). But once it became clear that such
a fund might be lodged in the United Nations, the
Bank turned around and brought IDA under its
umbrella. The Bank did not take competition from
regional development banks seriously until the
1990s, by which time several of them had grown
to a comparable size in their region.
Throughout the Bank's history its relationship
with foreign aid has been mixed. As a coordinator
of and secretariat to the DAC (the Development
Assistance Committee of the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development), the
Bank has welcomed the complementarity of foreign
aid to its own role. But the relationship has been
contentious as well, with the Bank believing that
the foreign aid driven by foreign policy concerns
crowded out the discipline that the Bank sought to
impose on its borrowers. And of course the biggest
competition in the 1970s and around the 2000s
was financial markets. One can't understand the
Bank's nonperformance in Latin America in the
1970s unless one realizes how easily the region's
countries could access global finance from private
banks, desperate to recycle their huge surpluses
of petrodollars. And I'm absolutely sure that in the
next phase of the history of the World Bank we'll
be looking at the competition from China.
in doing what it wants to do? What are the forces
from which it seeks autonomy? And I have always
felt that this is not well understood: a key trait of
the Bank that has shaped its autonomy has been
its financial design. Indeed, for any organization,
financial autonomy is the key to functional autonomy. That was one reason why the Bank, in the
early decades, worked very hard to prove itself as a
bank, and there were numerous occasions when the
Bank's management balanced the influence of the
White House and the Treasury with counterpressure
from Wall Street.
But the United States had less leverage in the
day-to-day running of the Bank than is commonly
understood, and even less in later years. The influence was more strategic: shared understandings
on country and sectoral priorities and no-go areas,
on the scale and timing of capital increases, and
of course on the selection of the Bank's president
and often its senior management as well. By itself
the United States could not vote down loans or
the annual budget, which has by and large been a
consensus affair.
Surprisingly, except for one incident that I'm
aware of, the Board of Executive Directors has not
used the annual approval of the budget to pressure
the Bank in any significant way. That exception was
in 1986, when Barber Conable had just joined as
the new president—and it was meant as a signal
that led to the major reorganization of 1987, which
was a traumatic experience for the Bank.
The critical pressure point on IBRD has been
at the time of capital increases. In each capital
increase major shareholders have sought to shape
or reshape the Bank's policies. But because capital
increases occur so rarely (just four times in the case
of IBRD: in 1959, 1979, 1988, and 2010), major
shareholders have looked to other mechanisms to
pressure the Bank.
Two additional points relating to the Bank's
capital are worth noting. First, the importance of
the paid-in portion of the Bank's capital in its equity
declined over time, and annual transfers from net
income became the principal source of increases in
the Bank's equity. And second, the comfort afforded
The Search for Autonomy
A third theme that emerges from our history is the
agency of the Bank. How autonomous is the Bank
to capital markets by the callable-capital portion of
the Bank's capital waned over time with the realization that if it were ever called all bets would be off.
Instead, borrowers' scrupulous record in servicing
their debts became more important. These trends,
however, were not reflected in concomitant changes
in the Bank's shareholding.
What fundamentally changed the Bank's search
for autonomy, as well as what it sought to do with it
and how it sought to achieve it, was the creation of
IDA. While IDA allowed the Bank to expand both the
scope and the scale of its lending, it also—if one
simply scrambles the letters—made the Bank in
some respects like AID (the U.S. Agency for International Development), politicized and bureaucratized.
The pressures on the Bank from major shareholders
grew over time, and the window through which those
pressures arrived was the replenishment of IDA.
If larger nonborrowing shareholders have used
capital increases and replenishments to advance
their agendas, smaller nonborrowing shareholders
have given the Bank "trust funds" to lubricate their
own. While trust funds undoubtedly have some
beneficial effects, they do subvert the governance
of the institution, since they mean that the budget
approved by the Bank's Board does not fully reflect
the institution's operational priorities. It is interesting
that the Bank has always been careful about telling
developing country members about the dangers
of off-budget financing and its implications. Trust
funds in some sense are really no different than
off-budget financing.
Well, in 1980 the PLO applied for observer status at the World Bank–International Monetary Fund
meetings. The Bank had rapidly expanded lending
under McNamara in the 1970s. But in the aftermath
of the 1979 (second) oil shock it was being shut
out of global capital markets. In the early decades
the Bank, under its Articles of Agreement, needed a
country's approval to borrow in its capital markets,
and at this time the Bank's borrowing program was
facing constraints. IDA was once again being argued
on Capitol Hill. McNamara, who was never very
popular on the Hill, desperately needed to get IDA
through as well as a much-needed capital increase.
The last thing he wanted was for the PLO to attend
the annual meetings in Washington, which would
have sent members of Congress into apoplexy.
Under the rules of the Bank at that time, the
Board of Governors had to approve any entity's
request for observer status. Let us just say that
the voting process was handled creatively, and
the decision not to invite the PLO went through
with the narrowest of margins. This led to strong
reactions among the PLO's supporters. Later, amid
the uproar, a committee chaired by Robert Muldoon,
then New Zealand's prime minister, was appointed
to review the electoral process, which had clearly
been shaped to get the desired outcome.
With the PLO denied permission, McNamara
had dodged a bullet in Congress, but he faced
another problem. The only countries that then had
the money to support the Bank's growing borrowing
program were Middle Eastern countries, especially
Saudi Arabia. The Bank was negotiating a large
borrowing from the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency,
and the Saudis were furious at the way the Bank,
as they saw it, had (mis)handled the PLO observer
vote. Now one interesting thing—and I'm sure many
of you are aware of this—is that when important
countries become upset at the Bank, one way that
the Bank has tried to placate them is to give them
a senior management appointment.
Indeed, this incident had several consequences. Around this time the Bank's chief economist,
Hollis Chenery, was stepping down, creating an
opening. The search committee that was formed
The Role of Contingency
A fourth theme that emerges in the Bank's history
is the role of contingency. The social sciences are
not very comfortable with contingency because
science is science and one should be able to generalize. But whether in the histories of individuals
or organizations, contingency plays a far bigger
role than we think. And I will tell you a story that
illustrates this. I could make a case to you that the
reason I'm standing here is the PLO (the Palestine
Liberation Organization). Why would you think that
the PLO has anything to do with it?
Institutions and Organizations
recommended Michael Bruno, the governor of the
Bank of Israel and an Israeli citizen. At that point
in time this choice was not going to go down well.
So Bruno was passed over (he would become chief
economist of the Bank a decade later and the PLO
would be invited as an observer in 1994, following
the signing of the Oslo Accord between Israel and
the PLO), although there were some other factors as
well. Anne Krueger became chief economist instead,
and her staunch pro-market views had significant
effects on the Bank's intellectual role. Important for
my purposes—and the reason that I am standing
here—is that Ibrahim Shihata (who was from Egypt)
was appointed as the Bank's general counsel, the
first from a developing country.
Shihata was one of the most influential general counsels of the Bank and the architect of the
Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency. But he
also played a key role in protecting the writing of
our official Bank history. Under the terms of the
contract that was signed when we began to write the
history, we had full access to all Bank documents
and correspondence. But the Bank retained the right
to ask the authors to excise any direct quotation
that might adversely affect relations with a member
country. My coauthors and I felt that we wanted to
tell the history by using as much as possible what
the Bank's staff and management had produced—
the countless memos and reports. In other words,
by using the Bank's own words rather than simply
putting our interpretation on them.
So we decided to force the issue not by having
a few quotations but by having thousands of them,
because if the Bank decided to kill direct quotations,
it would have to kill the entire official history. Shihata was sympathetic to the idea, and despite the
pressure he strongly backed us and ensured that
we were not asked to cut any quotation or change
any interpretation. And so the role of contingency,
the PLO, and the Bank's history are interlinked. Now
one could always argue that with any contingency,
as with all histories, we never know what the counterfactuals would have been. And that, of course,
always makes for interesting discussion.
A fifth theme that emerges is the distinction
between institutions and organizations. The role
of institutions in development has received much
attention in the past two decades. One can think
of the Bank (along with the International Monetary
Fund and the United Nations) as part of the postwar
institutional architecture of global governance. But
if one closely examines the internal workings of the
Bank—that is, the Bank as an organization rather
than in its institutional guise—one gets the sense
that institutions might be the skeleton but that
organizations provide the flesh and blood. While
numerous institutions have been set up, few have
developed the organizational capabilities and competencies that make them actually function over the
long term. (One can have an independent central
bank with all the formal features that economists
love. But if one puts a bunch of monkeys in charge
of an independent central bank, that independence
will be moot.)
It is this singular feature of the history of the
Bank as an organization—how it grows over time,
its much greater diversity in terms of nationality or
gender or the country of location of staff. But as the
Bank grows, its history is also a story of how the very
success of earlier years propels it into becoming
a much larger organization, and as that happens
the barnacles of bureaucracy begin to encrust the
institution with procedural fealty. The Bank began
to OD on ODs (Operational Directives). (Having to
read these was by far the most painful part of writing
the history.) While multiple bureaucratic layers and
complex systems and procedures are inevitable for
large organizations, they do have an adverse impact
on creativity and particularly on the willingness to
take risks. Taking swipes at bad projects is easy;
knowing the costs of not undertaking good projects
because of greater risk aversion is much harder.
Thinking about Performance and
This leads me to my sixth historical thread: how
should we think about the Bank's performance and
think carefully about who bears the cost of those
An important indicator of the Bank's performance—but one that cannot be picked up through
more quantitative analysis of the Bank—is its role
in killing off bad projects. Only if one looks carefully
into Bank documents does this unheralded contribution of the Bank become apparent, since almost
by definition a project that is nixed does not show
up in official performance indicators. An issue much
debated today might help illustrate this point: the
Bank's role in combating corruption.
Some have argued that the Bank did not pay
attention to this key issue in the early decades. One
explanation may be that it did not do so because
corruption wasn't that big a deal then. A second
explanation might lie in the changing perception of
the sacrosanct nature of sovereignty and the willingness of the international system to question its
limits. A third might be that even when the issue's
salience was becoming apparent, the Bank took an
ostrich-like approach and simply tried to ignore it.
The historical record is more complex. To take
an example: In the early 1950s a senior manager
of the Bank visited Cuba and met with Batista, the
then president. At a managing committee meeting
he reported back, saying that since "Batista is a
corrupt bastard" the Bank should not give him a
cent. That was it. There was no thick report with
multiple annexes and chest-thumping.
Indeed, in the early years specific lending decisions drew considerably on staff with deep sectoral
experience. Thus the documentation making the
case for the first loan to a developing country—to
Chile for electric power—was just a few pages.
Decades later the documentation for Bank-financed
electric power projects would be far thicker. Yet there
is no evidence that the later projects performed
better than the first. One could argue, of course,
that one is comparing apples with oranges. But
this example also tells a little about the changing
human capital composition in the Bank. People with
deep sectoral experience gradually got pushed out,
especially by economists after the creation of the
Young Professionals Program.
After I wrote my first draft chapter, my senior
coauthors each took me out for lunch. I was much
younger than they were, and my first draft was very
critical of the Bank: this has failed, that hasn't
worked, this was oversold, and so on. Richard
Webb returned my draft with the pages swamped
with red ink. He said that I should consider taking
out every adjective and adverb—their abundance
signaled that I was being intellectually lazy. The
adjective and adverb, he argued, must come into
your readers' minds from the strength of evidence
and the logic of the argument rather than by being
force-fed to them.
My other coauthor, John P. Lewis, who had worked
on development for nearly four decades, like a good
American used a sports analogy. He said, suppose
someone from Mars came down and was taken
to a baseball game. And someone said, look, this
guy is a tremendous hitter; his batting average is
.350. The man from Mars would say, my God, a 65
percent failure rate! And Lewis said, look, only if you
know how hard the game is would you appreciate
that a batting average of .350 is actually pretty
darn good. If development were easy, why would
one need the Bank?
One of the things, of course, about the Bank
is that it succeeds best in countries that need it
the least: the Chinas, Japans, and Koreas. And it
fails most, of course, in the countries that need it
the most—but where others fare scarcely better.
A bean-counting approach to performance
outcomes can have its own perverse effects. This
happened in the 1990s, when we were writing the
history, and made the Bank much more risk averse
than it had been and in some ways less intellectually honest about the development enterprise.
It failed to defend the position that development
necessarily entails risks and trade-offs and hence
failures are inevitable. How does one know whether
doing 10 projects painstakingly, with all the bells
and whistles that lead to "success," is better for
the overall development enterprise than doing 20
projects with a 30 percent failure rate? Is it more
fruitful to think less about failures per se and to
The Iron Law of Unintended
To return to our discussion on corruption, one
of the most striking transcripts is of a conversation
of McNamara with Indonesian president Suharto in
the late 1970s. The technocrats in Indonesia (the
so-called Berkeley mafia) had become worried about
the mounting levels of corruption. Recognizing their
own limited influence on the president, they tacitly
asked the Bank to quietly try and warn Suharto. The
only person with the stature to deliver this message
was McNamara, who flew to Jakarta. The transcript
of the conversation is fascinating as McNamara
appeals to the nationalism in Suharto and warns
of the dangers of the "cancer of corruption" to the
Indonesian nation. One of the major differences over
the decades is that while controversial messages
in earlier years were more likely to be delivered in
private, since the 1990s they have been given more
publicly, reflecting in part the greater transparency
in public institutions.
The last theme that emerges through the Bank's
history is the "iron law of unintended consequences." At the time we were writing the history, the
"Washington Consensus" was much in vogue.
Since then many have sharply criticized it—indeed,
a whole industry has grown up around trying to
slay the "neoliberal monster" that the Washington
Consensus supposedly gave birth to.
The Washington Consensus—with its emphasis
on global integration, rolling back the state, and
privileging the role of markets and the private sector—came toward the end of the Latin American
debt crisis and the beginning of the collapse of
the Soviet Union. It reflected an "end of history"
moment, with the West at the zenith of its power.
The creation of the World Trade Organization with
an agenda reflecting the West's preoccupations,
the multiple financial crises afflicting developing
countries in the 1990s (the Mexican, Asian, and
Russian financial crises)—all seemed to reaffirm
the West's dominance and the advancement of its
hegemonic agenda about economic development
through multilateral institutions that it controls and
influences the most (the Bretton Woods institutions
and the newly created World Trade Organization). And
of course the Bank was very much a part of this.
Fast-forward to a decade and a half after the
1997 Asian financial crisis, as "the rise of the rest"
and the relative decline of the West have become
the new conventional wisdom. Could it be that the
Washington Consensus was the best thing that
happened to developing countries at a meta-level,
reshaping the locus of global economic power in
ways that the forces most gung ho about pushing
it on developing countries never imagined?
I'll end with two thoughts. Be careful about
any teleological interpretation of history—or of
development. And be careful about what you ask
for—sometimes you might get it. And sometimes
you have to be careful about whom you ask to write
your history.
The Question of Comparative
This leads me to my seventh thread, a question that
has been raised periodically in the Bank's history:
what is the Bank's comparative advantage? Where
does it lie (countries, sectors, issues), and should
the Bank try (or has it tried) to develop a more
dynamic comparative advantage? The question is
not just about what it should do (which countries or
sectors) but the modalities of engagement. Provide
money or advice—or a combination of the two,
and if so, in what proportions? Deliver important
messages in private or in public? We live in an age
with far greater pressures to be more public and to
disclose information much more overtly. But has
that come at the cost of candidness, leading to
anodyne fluff? How close to the client should the
Bank be? After all, there is a slippery slope between
embeddedness and capture. And with "stakeholder"
terminology proliferating, who is the client?
Session Chair
William H. Becker
Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, George Washington University
William H. Becker is a professor of history and chair of the department of history
at the George Washington University. His research and teaching interests are the
history of business, business and public policy, the history of the international
economy, and the history of large-scale organizations (such as the World Bank, the
Export-Import Bank of the United States, NASA, and the Rockefeller Foundation).
He is the author or coauthor of six books and was also the general editor of the
Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography. His most recent
publication is Eisenhower and the Cold War Economy (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2011).
From Bank to Development Agency:
Implications for the
World Bank's Mission,
Governance, and Policy
Session 1
• Kathryn C. Lavelle—American Politics, the Presidency of the World Bank, and
Development Policy
• Michele Alacevich—Not a Knowledge Bank: Economic Research at the World Bank in
the Early 1950s
• Alain de Janvry and Jean-Jacques Dethier—The World Bank and Governance: The
Bank's Efforts to Help Build State Capacity
American Politics, the Presidency of the World Bank,
and Development Policy
Kathryn C. Lavelle
Ellen and Dixon Long Professor of World Affairs, Case Western Reserve University
What does the selection of the World Bank's president by the United
States mean for the relationship between the organization and its largest
Several recent studies in a variety of social science
disciplines have pointed to the connection between
domestic American politics and the World Bank,
a connection that seems to be particularly strong
given the relationships between Bank leadership
and the American political class. Yet few works
explore the nuances of these politics as they are
situated among the branches of U.S. government
in which visions of development have emerged
over time.
Taking the view that policy is far from consistent across the U.S. government, I argue that
the political game is far from over even after the
president makes a direct decision in either the
U.S. government or the international organization.
Decisions are often ignored or reversed within the
American policy process. World Bank presidents
do not seek the same goals as American presidential administrations once they move out of the
domestic sphere and into the international one.
Through the prism of the selection and networks
of four Bank presidents, this paper evaluates the
influence of U.S. politics on development policy
thinking and practice in the Bank during the tenure
of those presidents: Eugene Meyer, Eugene Black,
Robert McNamara, and James Wolfensohn. I propose that use of the historical narrative provides
a good method to investigate this topic—and
particularly the use of archival materials, because
they allow the researcher to examine different
points of view from different documentary sources.
The four case studies ask what view of development policy emerged in the Bank during each
Bank president's historical period and how it was
informed by actors in the U.S. presidential administration and major congressional figures active
on Bank policy. The primary evidence comes from
the oral histories conducted by each of the four
men with the World Bank Group Archives and their
archival correspondence files. Supplementing this
information are other primary sources and histories
of the men, their work, and their contributions to
the institution and development policy.
What insight emerges from a comparison of
these four cases? American presidents have no
doubt influenced the trajectory of the Bank and
thus global notions of development. Yet the circumstances accompanying weighted voting, and thus
the Bank's U.S. executive director controlling the
largest bloc of votes, have resulted in outcomes
From Bank to Development Agency:
Implications for the World Bank's
Mission, Governance, and Policy
not easily categorized outside their historical
context. The early clash between Meyer and U.S.
Executive Director Emilio Collado that contributed
to Meyer's early resignation as Bank president,
combined with the desire of the U.S. foreign policy
establishment to tap New York capital markets,
resulted in a weaker board than the Bank's Articles
of Agreement might suggest.
Nonetheless, the Bank's transformation from a
bank to a development agency can be associated
with the desire of two of the presidents to seek
a high degree of independence from the U.S.
government. McNamara and Wolfensohn, the
two presidents with the most extensive political
networks before their appointment, used these
connections to increase the Bank's institutional
independence as a development agency.
In these later examples partisan politics play a
role in U.S.-Bank relations, but one that could be
interpreted as creating more "space" between the
government and the international organization. This
has been the case particularly when a Bank president is appointed by a presidential administration
from one political party and that administration is
then followed by one from the other party—resulting
in a new U.S. executive director appointed by a
different party, who reports to a Treasury official
from that party. Thus U.S. partisan politics do
not necessarily tie the Bank more closely to the
Records of the Presidents of the World Bank are some of the
most heavily used records in the Archives. Lavelle's paper
examines four presidents; this illustration is one item she
used in her research. Joseph Bowman on behalf of Henry
Fowler, Secretary of Treasury, to Robert McNamara, April
28, 1968, enclosing "Congressional Opposition to the International Development Association and the Inter-American
Development Bank 1959-1969"; General Correspondence;
WB IBRD/IDA 03-04, Office of the President, Records of
Robert McNamara; 309676B, World Bank Group Archives
hegemonic power within it through the selection
of its president by the United States.
Kathryn C. Lavelle's paper is available as Policy Research
Working Paper 6377 (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013).
Not a Knowledge Bank: Economic Research at the World
Bank in the Early 1950s
Michele Alacevich
Associate Director for Research Activities, Heyman Center for the Humanities, Columbia
Today economists are the largest and most powerful professional group at
the World Bank. But in the early 1950s they were a marginalized minority
Development economics emerged as a discipline
in the aftermath of World War II. Decolonization
had given birth to many newly independent countries, virtually all very poor; meanwhile, the onset
of the Cold War generated a competition for
influence in developing countries, which turned
their development into an international priority.
The birth of development economics dovetailed
with the reorientation of the International Bank for
Reconstruction and Development—today known
as the World Bank—from supporting European
reconstruction to funding development policies
worldwide. Not surprisingly, the Bank as an institution and the intellectuals who pioneered the
new discipline often crossed paths, and it is fair
to say that the Bank and development economics
are part of the same story.
Indeed, one would think that the Bank was a
natural incubator for development economics: it
quickly became the largest international organization dedicated to fostering development in the
developing world. In addition, the Bank had a lively
Economic Department, whose studies often provided essential knowledge on the economic conditions
of developing countries and informed the Bank's
development policies. The Economic Department
in those early years, like its successor today, was
an important actor in the decision-making process
at the Bank. Yet while the Bank was very active in
development policies worldwide during its first 20
years of life, it was remarkably silent in the field
of development economics.
This apparent paradox can be explained by
observing the early parable of the Bank's Economic Department: after a lively and stimulating
beginning—or perhaps because of its lively and
stimulating beginning—the Economic Department was marginalized and then eliminated. In
the Bank's first 15 years of life the institution's
main competence shifted toward engineering
and, conversely, the importance of economists
diminished. This ultimately led to the elimination
of economic research from the Bank's activities.
Economic research at the Bank was slowly revived
From Bank to Development Agency:
Implications for the World Bank's
Mission, Governance, and Policy
only in the late 1960s, and more convincingly in
the early 1970s.
The early activity of the Economic Department
marks a particularly important phase of the early
institution-building process at the Bank: the shaping
of a distinct mind-set toward policy issues that set
the Bank's Economic Department apart from other
departments and the Bank's senior management,
and the progressive irreconcilableness between
economists and top management due to different
visions for the Bank and its role.
Today the World Bank is without doubt a predominantly economic institution, and economists
are its largest and most powerful professional
group. In the early 1950s, however, economists
were a marginalized minority, and as history shows,
different professional groups interpreted the
Bank's agenda and priorities in different ways. The
recent change in leadership at the Bank signals
that the institution is changing again. This does
not mean that the Bank's economists are at risk
of again becoming an endangered species, but
it is a good time for the Bank to reflect on the
benefits of embracing disciplinary diversity within
the institution.
Records of the Bank's work in countries around the world
are the heart of the Bank's archives. Alacevich used the
headquarter's records of the Bank's early work in Colombia.
Letter, Lauchlin Currie to Robert L. Garner, October 27, 1949;
Colombia, General Survey Mission (CURRIE), 1949-1952;
WB IBRD/IDA 01 Country Operational Files, 1946-1998;
819729F; World Bank Group Archives
The World Bank and Governance: The Bank's Efforts to
Help Build State Capacity
Alain de Janvry
Jean-Jacques Dethier
Professor, Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics
and Goldman School of Public
Policy, University of California,
Research Manager, Development
Economics, World Bank
Why doesn't the World Bank focus its efforts on helping poor countries build
state capacity? Part of the reason may be political
The World Bank's effectiveness is based not
just on proposing investment projects and policy
reforms but also on assisting developing country
governments in designing and implementing these
projects and reforms. Reviewing research and project documents from throughout the Bank's history,
we find that the Bank recognizes the importance
of the state for its effectiveness and has recently
made efforts to improve the governance capacity of
developing countries. Yet the Bank's performance
in this area has been weak—with high costs for its
effectiveness. What explains this relative failure?
Outlining some conceptual underpinnings for
the view that an effective state is essential for
development, this paper underscores the need
for a wide range of government actions to foster
inclusive growth. Developing country governments
are unlikely to successfully absorb large amounts
of aid if their capacity is not significantly increased.
We argue that donors should focus on building
capacity in such key areas as revenue mobilization,
public spending, macroeconomic stability, basic
infrastructure, financial systems, and basic legal
and regulatory structures. Efforts should concentrate on a limited reform agenda that is both
economically sensible (and mindful of sequencing
issues) and sociopolitically feasible.
The thinking at the Bank about the role of
the state in developing countries has evolved
over time. To simplify the history of this process,
we distinguish four phases: From its creation in
the 1940s until the early 1960s the Bank held
fairly standard conservative views about what
governments should and should not do. During the
McNamara years the Bank envisaged a proactive
state. During the 1980s, with more conservative
bankers as presidents, this changed—government
failures were seen as characteristic of developing
countries and the motto was "getting prices right."
Since the 1990s state intervention has gradually
recovered its legitimacy—though this global assessment must be nuanced—and the emphasis has
been on "creating a favorable business climate,"
with a healthy dose of skepticism toward industrial
policy interventions and even the regulation of
major economic sectors.
Through a historical narrative of the Bank's
changing approach to country assistance, we show
that the Bank has taken governance issues increasingly seriously. It has embedded governance-related
components in projects and programs—but with
From Bank to Development Agency:
Implications for the World Bank's
Mission, Governance, and Policy
insufficient support to enhance the capacity of
governments. There is thus a disconnect between
the Bank's rhetoric and advocacy around effective
government and actual results.
We propose an interpretative thesis on why
the Bank has performed poorly in building state
capacity, focusing on the two main reasons that
have been advanced. The first is lack of knowledge
on how to proceed. If this were absolutely true,
it would mean that the Bank would be doomed
to failure no matter what it did. Economists have
limited wisdom about transforming the state into
a development instrument—and this calls for
more research and experimentation. Yet enough is
known to achieve at least some progress in building
capacity and improving the quality of governance.
The second reason is reluctance by Bank leadership to promote a proactive state, and here our
interpretation is political. It involves unwillingness
to promote state support to avoid stakeholder divisions, delegation of decision making and budget
authority to country offices, and a lag in increasing
Bank support to the state in response to growing
demand from clients. Support to governments is
a divisive issue among Bank shareholders—particularly between the United States on the one
hand and European and Asian countries on the
other. It is therefore an issue that is ignored or left
unresolved for internal political reasons, with the
For its first forty years, the Bank maintained a central file for
records that related to topics other than work in a country.
This item, from the central file on "Development," shows the
Bank's internal debate over the role of the Bank's resident
representatives in countries and what kind of advisory and
technical services they should perform. Memorandum, O.
J. McDiarmid to Joseph Rucinski, November 14, 1960;
Development – General V; WB IBRD/IDA 02 Central Files
1946-1986; 183995B; World Bank Group Archives
president and his managing directors unwilling or
unable to exercise sufficient authority on the matter.
Session Chair
Pamela Cox
Senior Vice President for Change Management, World Bank Group
As the World Bank Group's senior vice president for change management,
Pamela Cox is responsible for leading the Group's reform efforts, for coordinating
and sequencing all change initiatives, and for overall internal and external communications around the change agenda.
Until December 2012 Ms. Cox was regional vice president for East Asia and Pacific,
leading the World Bank's strategy in the region. She oversaw a portfolio of more
than US$30 billion in loans, grants, credits, and trust funds, coordinating and supervising the activities of more than 1,000 staff. From January 2005 to December 2011
Ms. Cox served as regional vice president for Latin America and the Caribbean,
guiding a strategic shift to reposition the Bank as a key development partner among
diverse clients seeking a variety of knowledge and financial services.
Earlier in her career Ms. Cox was a Bank economist working on agricultural and
environmental issues in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. From 2000 to 2004
she was director of strategy and operations in the Office of the Vice President for
Africa. From 1996 to 2000 she served as country director for South Africa, Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland.
Ms. Cox, a U.S. citizen, holds a doctorate in development economics and policy
and a master's degree in law and diplomacy and development economics from
the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, and a bachelor's
degree in international studies and international economics from Reed College in
Portland, Oregon.
Constructive World Bank–Client Partnerships:
Three Case Studies
Session 2
• Rahul Mukherji—The Role of the World Bank Group Archives in Research: Finding the
Tipping Point in Economic Ideas in India
• Giovanni Zanalda—A Constructive Partnership: The World Bank and the Republic of
Korea Early in the Country's Economic Takeoff
• W. J. Dorman—Urban Development in Cairo, 1976–93: The Perils of "Everyday State
Building" in the Arab Republic of Egypt
The Role of the World Bank Group Archives in Research:
Finding the Tipping Point in Economic Ideas in India
Rahul Mukherji
Associate Professor, South Asian Studies Program, National University of Singapore
Archival evidence helped establish the importance of homegrown ideas in
engendering persistence and change in Indian economic institutions
The World Bank Group Archives played a pivotal role
in my research on economic thinking and change in
India. The research has produced two substantial
publications: Globalization and Deregulation: Ideas,
Interests and Economic Change in India (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming); and "Ideas,
Interests, and the Tipping Point: Economic Change
in India," Review of International Political Economy
20, 2 (2013): 363–89.
The book and paper argue that it is important to
locate the role of economic ideas within the policy
community both in judging how India would respond
to foreign pressure at the time of a balance of
payments crisis and in understanding institutional
change in the country in 1991. Change in economic
institutions embracing or opposing industrial deregulation and integration with the global economy
ultimately depended on the dominant ideas held
within the government—ideas about what economic
principles would work best in promoting India's
economic growth. I have argued that ideational
change in India followed a tipping point model, in
which slow-moving endogenous changes "tipped
over" to what appeared to be radical change at
the time of a balance of payments crisis in 1991.
To make the case for this model of economic
change, it was important for me to establish what
the dominant ideas of the day were at the time
of India's two most severe balance of payments
crises, in 1966 and 1991. I argued that in 1966,
when ideas within the government favored import
substitution, India did not deviate from that model
despite pressure from the World Bank and the
United States. In 1991, however, ideas that had
evolved since 1975 suggested that private sector participation and integration with the global
economy had to replace India's state-led autarkic
industrialization. The balance of payments crisis
of 1991 constituted a tipping point: the executive
and the technocracy took advantage of the crisis,
and pressure from the International Monetary
Fund, to change the course of India's economic
history—because of a sincere belief in the need
for a shift in the policy paradigm.
The World Bank Group Archives led the way in
declassifying the Bell Mission Report of 1965. This
Constructive World
Bank–Client Partnerships:
Three Case Studies
14-volume report, the outcome of a Bank mission
to India headed by Bernard Bell, outlined conditions
facing the Indian economy and steps to be taken
to alleviate those conditions. It also laid out the
conditions that were offered to India in return for
funding. But this 1965 report remained a confidential document until 2010. Had it not been for
initiatives taken by the World Bank Group Archives
and the positive role played by the World Bank's
Delhi office, this substantial documentary evidence
on India's economic history would have remained
hidden from the scholarly world. In addition, the
archivist Bertha Wilson helped locate pertinent
material in the oral history archives of the Bank.
Together, the Bell Mission Report and the
oral history archives helped me establish that
the government of India had taken a position at
significant variance with that of the World Bank in
1966. And once the government had taken that
position, it could not be coerced into changing it.
This critical piece of evidence helped establish
the important role of homegrown ideas in engendering persistence and change in the institutions
governing the Indian economy.
The Bank has had an oral history program since 1961.
Publicly available oral histories are located in the "Archives"
section of the Bank's website. Mukherji used four of them
in his research for the paper, including this one with J.
Burke Knapp. Oral history interview, J. Burke Knapp,
October 6 and 29, 1981, WB IBRD/IDA 44-02 Oral histories,
1981-1989 project; http://siteresources.worldbank.org
A Constructive Partnership: The World Bank and the Republic
of Korea Early in the Country's Economic Takeoff
Giovanni Zanalda
Assistant Research Professor of Social Sciences, Economics, and History, Duke University
The World Bank played a crucial part in supporting the local development
of know-how, administrative skills, and understanding of international
The post-1960 economic growth of the Republic
of Korea is considered one of the most successful
examples of economic development in a relatively
short period. It took Korea slightly more than a
decade (1966–77) to double its income per capita. More importantly, this growth spurt was not
limited to the initial takeoff stage of the 1960s
and 1970s but has continued, with occasional
downturns, to the present. The Korean economy
embarked on a catch-up dynamic that by the end
of the 1990s brought its income per capita close
to levels in mature economies such as the United
States and Japan and on par with levels in several
Western European nations.
A vast literature documents how importsubstitution and export-led policies as well as
education, social factors, and domestic and foreign
institutions enabled the transformation of Korea
from a low-income economy in the early 1960s
into a high-income one by the mid-1990s. Korea's
membership in the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development after 1996 and in
the G-20, the presidency of which Korea held in
2010, points to its international standing among
advanced economies.
There is general agreement that openness
played a crucial part in the success of the Korean
economy, as well as that of other East Asian economies, over the last quarter of the 20th century.
But authors have been debating the causal links,
with some arguing that openness was the initial
driver of growth and others that it was the second
step during the economic takeoff period. Those in
the second group focus more on the high level of
domestic investment and the structural reforms
that occurred throughout the 1960s and early
1970s, arguing that it was these factors that later
enabled Korea to succeed as an open economy.
They claim that openness worked because of the
initial high level of investment in the domestic
economy and the capacity to adapt imported technology—and that the inflow of capital mattered only
once the economy had already begun its ascent.
Drawing on material from the World Bank's
archives, this paper complements the existing
literature by throwing some new light on policies,
debates, and lesser-known figures at the center
of Korea's development takeoff. It illustrates the
evolution of the relationship between Korea and
the World Bank throughout the 1960s and 1970s
Constructive World
Bank–Client Partnerships:
Three Case Studies
with respect to the country's development policy
and strategies and brings to the forefront the
special role of agents and institutions involved in
the decision-making process. The paper focuses in
particular on the analysis of material and general
correspondence related to the World Bank's take
on and support for Korea's First and Second FiveYear Economic Development Plans (1962–66 and
1967–71), the preparation for the first meetings
of consultative groups for Korea, and World Bank
missions to the country.
On the basis of preliminary findings, the paper
shows how Korea, despite widespread external
skepticism about its potential for growth and the
geopolitical concerns characterizing the early
1960s, managed to increasingly attract foreign
capital and technical support throughout the
decade. It emphasizes the crucial part played
by the World Bank in supporting the local development of know-how, administrative skills, and
understanding of international markets as well
as in promoting debates about development
policies. The paper also suggests that the World
Bank is a unique repository of knowledge about
development practices and policies, of which the
archives constitute an essential pillar.
World Bank officials correspond regularly with heads of
state, and their correspondence is included in the country
files. Zanalda used this letter from Korean president Park
Chung Hee, which was sent in both Korean and English.
Letter, May 3, 1968, President Park Chung Hee to Robert
McNamara, Korea General, General Correspondence 01;
WB IBRD/IDA 01 Country Operational Files, 1946-1998;
182859B; World Bank Group Archives
Urban Development in Cairo, 1976–93: The Perils of
"Everyday State Building" in the Arab Republic of Egypt
W. J. Dorman
Honorary Fellow, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Edinburgh
Three development projects in Cairo illustrate the challenges of building in
sustainability through local institutions capable of urban governance
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the World Bank
and other development agencies, such as the
U.S. Agency for International Development (AID),
undertook a series of frequently unsuccessful
urban development projects in Cairo. While hardly
exceptional, the failed projects provide a unique
window on the Egyptian state's "neglectful rule"
of its capital.
Drawing on research in the World Bank's
archives and other sources of information, this
paper examines three such projects—the Bank's
Urban I and II Projects and an AID project—as cases
of "everyday state building." In Cairo development
agencies sought to foster an administratively
competent Egyptian state capable of engaging
with ordinary Cairenes to improve shelter, services, and livelihoods. The failure of such efforts
illustrates how the reproduction of Egypt's durably
authoritarian political order, still in place since the
1950s, depends on state-society disengagement.
The Bank's Urban I Project, which provided
infrastructure and services to one Cairo neighborhood, was judged in a critical audit to be "less
than satisfactory" with respect to its cost-recovery,
institution-building, and sustainability objectives.
The Urban II Project, which ran through the early
1990s and focused on traffic management in Cairo,
was declared by the completion report to be only
"marginally satisfactory," with a "negligible" impact
on institution building and "uncertain" sustainability. The much larger-scale AID project, which
included construction of an owner-built housing
development, was denounced by a 1989 Forbes
magazine article as "one of the biggest fiascoes
ever in the history of [AID]."
These interventions frequently targeted informal neighborhoods established without planning
permission, lacking adequate infrastructure, and
generally neglected by state agencies, which lacked
the resources to intervene in them. Development
agencies attempted to increase state capacity to
manage and service the city through the creation
of client agencies that would implement projects,
recover costs from beneficiaries, and use the
recovered costs in subsequent projects.
Such efforts can be understood as a kind of
"everyday state building" in which development
agencies move beyond mere service provision
and seek to build in sustainability through local
institutions capable of urban governance. While
less dramatic than the accounts of external
intervention and imposition that now dominate
Constructive World
Bank–Client Partnerships:
Three Case Studies
the literature on state building, these projects
addressed equally fundamental issues of state
capacity—for example, the mobilization of societal
resources for development objectives.
But most such efforts at negotiated state building were ultimately unsuccessful. While Egyptian
state agencies were eager to receive economic
assistance, they balked at the institutional reforms
and demands for state-society engagement built
into the projects. Such measures may have been
framed and understood by development agencies in
technical terms, but they constituted a direct challenge to the reproduction of the post-1952 order,
which was based at least in part on clientelism
and exclusion. So while all three of the projects
predate development agencies' preoccupation
with democratization, civil society, and even participation, they nonetheless entailed a political
challenge to the durable authoritarianism of the
Sadat and Mubarak governments.
The failure of the projects also demonstrates
the limited capacity of development agencies to
use aid as leverage for politically sensitive reforms.
In the case of the AID project, the strategic considerations that had led the U.S. government to
provide Egypt with substantial economic assistance
undercut demands for substantive reform. And
all three cases show why political factors must
be acknowledged in development interventions.
Letter, E. T. Barnes to S. Sandstrom, October 17, 1979;
Egypt, Loan Urban Development II, Greater Cairo Urban
Development Project; WB IBRD/IDA 01 Country Operational
Files, 1946-1998; 66041B; World Bank Group Archives
Session Chair
Vijayendra Rao
Lead Economist, Development Research Group, World Bank
Vijayendra Rao, a lead economist in the World Bank's Development Research
Group, integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology, and political science to study the social, cultural, and political
context of extreme poverty in developing countries. Dr. Rao has published in leading journals on subjects that include the rise in dowries in India, the social and economic context of domestic violence, the economics of public celebrations, sex work
in Calcutta, and how to integrate economic and social theory to develop more effective public policy. He coedited Culture and Public Action and History, Historians and
Development Policy and coauthored World Development Report 2006: Equity and
Development. Jointly with Ghazala Mansuri, he recently completed the World Bank
Policy Research Report Localizing Development: Does Participation Work?
Dr. Rao obtained a BA (economics, statistics, sociology) from St. Xavier's College–
Bombay (now Mumbai) and a PhD (economics) from the University of Pennsylvania
and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Economics Research Center and an associate
of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies at the University of Chicago. He taught
at the University of Michigan and Williams College before joining the World Bank's
Research Department in 1999. He serves on the editorial boards of several leading
journals, is a member of the Successful Societies Program at the Canadian Institute
for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and advises research institutes and nongovernmental organizations in India, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Dialogues of Development:
Past Contestations,
Present Policy
Session 3
• Daniel Immerwahr—Before Social Capital: The Forgotten History of Community
Development in the Cold War Era
• Michael Woolcock—History, Historians, and Development Debates: Using the World
Bank's Archives to Address Five Key Issues
• Trudy Huskamp Peterson—Archival Research as Unfinished Business
Before Social Capital: The Forgotten History of Community
Development in the Cold War Era
Daniel Immerwahr
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Northwestern University
The international community development movement of the 1950s merits
our attention today because its basic strategies have returned
In recent decades we have become aware of the
blindness, arrogance, and recklessness that have
accompanied attempts by industrial nations to
develop the global South. Too often, as we have
seen, aid and development have been little more
than top-down attempts to impose abstract notions
of "modernity" on poorer nations with no acknowledgment of the importance of local variation or of
cultural traditions.
This paper argues, however, that from the very
beginning of the U.S. engagement with overseas
development, many of the largest and most
influential U.S. government aid programs were
grassroots, localist, and antitechnocratic in their
stated orientation. The aid officials presiding over
such projects, often experts on agriculture or rural
society, entered the field of foreign relations with
a set of preoccupations that differed from those
of modernization theory. As a rule, they privileged
small-scale works, local knowledge, democratic
participation, and communal solidarity at the level
of the village.
In collaboration with Third World policy makers,
these aid officials designed a political project—
community development—that came to hold
sway throughout the global South in the 1950s.
Community development programs in a number of
countries (the United States had posted advisers
to programs in 47 countries by 1956) regularly
commanded heavy investments from the United
States, host country governments, international bodies such as the United Nations and the
Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), and
philanthropic bodies such as the Ford Foundation
and CARE.
Community development certainly did not
achieve all that it sought to. But it reshaped politics and development in a number of Third World
countries—including Colombia, India, Iran, Pakistan,
the Philippines, and Vietnam—not only spawning
thousands of small-scale aid projects but also
leading in some key cases to the democratization
of local governments.
The international community development
movement of the 1950s merits our attention
today because its basic strategies have returned.
Under the labels participatory development,
community-based development, and communitydriven development, new programs have reanimated
the basic approach pioneered in the midcentury
decades and have come to dominate our thinking
about how to do development. But what is
Dialogues of Development:
Past Contestations,
Present Policy
remarkable about the rapid rise of community
approaches to development over the past 20 years
is how little acknowledgment there has been of
prior experiments with the practice.
Our inability to remember what was once a major
policy initiative that shaped the course of dozens
of nations is all the more alarming because, by and
large, community development projects during the
Cold War failed. What development experts found,
in nation after nation, was that attempts to enroll
poor and rural people in development campaigns
provided openings for local elites, speaking in the
name of "the village" or "the neighborhood," to
capture state resources and channel them toward
projects that either enriched them personally or
at least did nothing to threaten their local bases
of power.
This skewing of participatory projects toward
village headmen and the like proved corrosive,
diminishing both the willingness of people to participate in development projects and the effectiveness
of those projects. Strikingly, scholars have noted
similar problems with the World Bank's community
projects today. Now is the time for an assessment
of community and participatory strategies that
takes account of their long history, one that asks
about both their advantages and their limits.
During the 1950s, as the community development projects
were developing, the United States was also shipping surplus
agricultural commodities abroad. This 1959 paper, written
by Bank economist Dragoslav Avramovic, analyzes the
impact of the surplus disposal program on economic development. Memorandum, Dragoslav Avramovic to Davidson
Sommers, May 14, 1959, enclosing "The U.S. Agricultural
Surplus Disposal Program and Economic Development";
Development – General V; WB IBRD/IDA 02 Central Files
1946-1986; 183995B; World Bank Group Archives
History, Historians, and Development Debates: Using the
World Bank's Archives to Address Five Key Issues
Michael Woolcock
Lead Social Development Specialist, Development Research Group, World Bank
In development circles, everyone agrees that history matters. But historians
could make a much greater contribution to development policy debates
History, whether understood as the past or the
discipline, is a topic on which there is a strong
consensus in development circles: just as on
the broader category of context, everyone agrees
that it matters. At least in principle. In practice,
it is rare to encounter a country poverty assessment, or any other major country-level report by a
multilateral or bilateral development agency, that
engages seriously with how a country's present
opportunities, challenges, constraints, and achievements emerged from (and continue to be shaped
by) particular constellations of factors and events
in its past.
This paper concurs with the notion that history matters, but extends the logic to argue that
therefore historians must matter, and matter in
particular ways for certain key issues. It seeks to
explain the paradoxical disjuncture between the
consensus and the neglect of history, considers
how historians can contribute positively to development policy debates, and offers five substantive
issues, or domains of inquiry, that should be at
the forefront of these debates.
These five issues—agricultural productivity,
state capability, equitable taxation, rule of law,
and social inclusion—are important in their own
right. But they are also both of great contemporary significance and potentially amenable to the
types of analyses that historians of international
agencies can offer. They are topics that have
been and remain at the heart of the development
enterprise, yet the relative attention afforded them
has changed over time, as has indeed their very
meaning to World Bank staff and clients alike.
Careful historical and archival inquiry not only
can document when and how these changes
occurred but also can spell out their enduring
consequences: from prosaic considerations relating to the bases for determining what works (and
thus enhancing development effectiveness) to the
broader intellectual frameworks shaping what is
thinkable, sayable, prioritized, and implemented
at any given moment.
On agriculture, archival research could be
instrumental in documenting when and how its
status began to decline among development professionals, what the consequences have been for
the resources (staff time, projects) allocated to
it, and what the sources of variation are among
and within countries (that is, why some countries
or states, more than others, have sustained their
commitments to agriculture). On state capability,
Dialogues of Development:
Past Contestations,
Present Policy
archival research could help identify specific countries, sectors, and moments in which implementation dynamics were taken seriously and track
the consequences of this for both how effective
projects have been and how a given project's
performance was explained to others.
On equitable taxation, archival research could
help us discern whether, when, how, and through
whom durable political settlements have been
reached on the desirability and possibility of undertaking a cornerstone (if inherently contentious)
activity of the modern democratic state. On the
rule of law, it would be instructive to learn how
justifications for its promotion have changed over
time and how persistent "nonaccomplishment"
in moving from agreement on its importance to
actually bringing it about has been explained or
Finally, on social inclusion, it would be highly
beneficial for archival historians to discern from
the written accounts (and oral testimony from
retired Bank staff) how both the Bank itself and its
client counterparts have grappled with contending
notions of what it means—for a country, for a policy
dialogue, for a project—to be socially inclusive (to
incorporate, for example, the specific concerns of
minority populations).
The Bank's archives hold thousands of photographs and
sound and video recordings. This is a photograph of Robert
McNamara making one of the most famous speeches in
Bank history: his address to the Bank's Board of Governors
meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, in which he outlined an agenda for
combating rural poverty. The audio recording of the speech
is available in the "Archives" section of the Bank's website:
Archival Research as Unfinished Business
Trudy Huskamp Peterson
Chair, Human Rights Working Group, International Council on Archives
Research is always unfinished. But it is only through the use of archives that
we begin to understand what truly has transpired among us
Research in archives as unfinished business: every
researcher knows the feeling. When we think of
research on the history of development—a vast
topic with no discernible boundaries—the research
required seems limitless. An enormous number
of archives hold significant research material for
the study of development.
The logical place to star t research on
development topics is with the archives of the
agencies directly concerned with development:
the national agencies, such as the Canadian
International Development Agency, and certain
international nongovernmental organizations
(NGOs), such as Action Against Hunger. Records
of national governments offer much potential
for research on development, not only the
records of their development agency or foreign
ministry but also those of agencies that served
as development models for other countries.
Archives of intergovernmental bodies, such as
the development banks, are central sources for
research on development. Records of corporations—
multinational commercial enterprises, medical
and health care organizations, big architectural
firms—should become more available if they
take seriously the Guiding Principles on Business
and Human Rights that were endorsed by the
United Nations Human Rights Council in 2011.
Business archives are balanced by the archives
of labor unions and syndicates. Also useful are
records of international sports bodies, faith-based
organizations, educational institutions, and NGOs.
Indeed, nearly all types of archives have potential
for use in studying development.
Two caveats are important, however. First,
some records will have a higher kilo/PhD ranking
than others. (A kilo/PhD is a ratio showing how
many kilograms of records a researcher must read
in order to write a PhD dissertation; its modern
counterpart is a kilobyte/PhD.) Second, only a
tiny fraction of the extant records are available
electronically, and relying only on sources found
online is a sure way to miss important material.
What about access to all these archives?
To an archivist, access means the availability of
archives for consultation as a result of both legal
Dialogues of Development:
Past Contestations,
Present Policy
authorization and the existence of finding aids.
Since the end of the Cold War the international
archival community has developed standards for
finding aids that help researchers better understand the contents and contexts of the records in
archives. Then, in August 2012, the International
Council on Archives adopted a best-practice
standard on the legal authorization for access
to archives: the Principles of Access to Archives.
The principles, 10 in number with accompanying explanatory text, address access issues in
both public and private archives. An introduction
discusses the purpose and scope of the principles
and the shared responsibilities for implementing
them (http://www.ica.org/13619/toolkits-guides
The business of archival research is the process by which we begin to understand the manifold ways in which multiple operators shaped the
development of the world we live in. As the very
first sentence of the Principles says, "Archives
are preserved for use by present and future generations." Research is always unfinished, but it is
only through the use of archives that we begin to
understand what truly has transpired among us.
The Bank's archives hold personal papers donated by former
Bank staff members or their heirs. Gloria Davis was the first
anthropologist hired by the World Bank, and she brought
with her extensive experience working in Indonesia. Davis
was part of virtually every Bank review of the Indonesia
transmigration project; this map from her papers is from
the Transmigration I Project involving the areas of Baturaja
and Way Abung. Map, "Sket Peta Kab. Lampung Utara,"
ca. 1980; Indonesia transmigration program subject file;
WB IBRD/IDA 84-05, Personal papers of Gloria Davis; World
Bank Group Archives
Session Chair
James Boughton
Historian, International Monetary Fund (Retired)
James Boughton was historian of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 1992
to 2012. In 2001–10 he also served as assistant director in the Strategy, Policy, and
Review Department at the IMF. From 1981 until he was named historian, he held various positions in the IMF Research Department. Before joining the IMF staff, he was
a professor of economics at Indiana University and had served as an economist at
the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in Paris. Dr. Boughton holds a PhD in economics from Duke University. He has written two volumes of
IMF history: Silent Revolution: The International Monetary Fund 1979–1989 and Tearing Down Walls: The International Monetary Fund 1990–1999. His publications also
include a textbook on money and banking, a book on the U.S. federal funds market,
several books that he edited or coedited, and articles in professional journals on
international finance, monetary theory and policy, international policy coordination,
and the history of economic thought.
The Role of Archives
in International
Session 4
• Elisa Liberatori Prati—The World Bank's Archives: 60 Years of Development
Knowledge on the "Science of Delivery"
• Pamela Tripp-Melby—The International Monetary Fund's Archives for Economic
• Bridget Sisk—Archives of Development in the United Nations Secretariat: Murky Past,
Unclear Future
The World Bank's Archives: 60 Years of Development
Knowledge on the "Science of Delivery"
Elisa Liberatori Prati
Chief Archivist, World Bank Group
The World Bank's archives offer a wealth of case
studies and unpublished primary sources to analyze
patterns of development
If history matters, archives can help. And the World
Bank's archives offer a wealth of case studies and
unpublished primary sources to help researchers
understand patterns of development. The archives
contain 193,000 linear feet of development
information related to World Bank Group member
countries dating from 1946 to the present—correspondence, project files, country files, economic
reports, sector studies, policy files, oral history
interviews, and films, videos, and photographs.
Stacked, the boxes would reach seven times the
height of Mount Everest—and the holdings continue to grow. Descriptions of 55 of the 78 fonds
(groups of records from a single office or, in a few
cases, from a single individual) are available at
In 2010 the World Bank, under its new Access
to Information Policy, launched an effort to make
more information available to the public than ever
before. Thousands of historical documents were
released from the archives and made available
on the Bank's website, through the "Documents
and Reports" web page. Today the site provides
access to more than 130,000 documents, many
of them in multiple languages, with the aim of
better sharing the institution's knowledge base.
The "Documents and Reports" web page is one
of the most frequently accessed on the Bank's
site, averaging more than 100,000 unique users
a month.
To increase the accessibility of Bank records
even more, the World Bank Group Archives is
developing an "e-archives" project. This effort is
aimed at providing people—no matter where they
are—with easy access to public records from the
Bank's archives; disseminating records online as
a way to share knowledge and information and
enhance transparency and accountability; and
presenting records in a way that clearly communicates their context and original order.
We welcome researchers to come and use the
records from the archives. Our understanding of
development will benefit enormously from your
The Role of Archives in
International Organizations
The International Monetary Fund's Archives for Economic
Pamela Tripp-Melby
Chief, Information Services Division,
International Monetary Fund (Retired)
The International Monetary Fund's archives
provide access to historical policies, decisions,
and research for both internal and external
With a mandate for global economic and financial
stability, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)
has many roles, all of which rely on accurate information. To carry out their work, IMF economists
use information from both primary and secondary
sources. The IMF's archives are an important
resource, providing authoritative, reliable information on historical policies, decisions, and research.
The IMF contributes to the global information
pool by sharing its authoritative data and analyses.
As part of its commitment to transparency, the
IMF opened its historical materials to the public
in 1996. Now, most Executive Board documents
are open after three years, board minutes and
decisions after five years, and other documentary
(departmental) material after 20 years. Archival
material goes through established processes to
be prepared for public access. A routine declassification process makes the large majority of
restricted documents public.
Researchers worldwide can now access a
searchable website with descriptions of archive
holdings and links to Executive Board minutes
and documents. Nearly 200,000 documents are
available online. The archives are accessed hundreds of times a year, by IMF staff and by external
researchers—from academics and corporate
economists to nongovernmental watchdogs and
national and international civil servants.
What do researchers who use the IMF's archives
study? Internal researchers typically look at precedents in the IMF's policies and operations; external
researchers often study past events that shape our
economic world today. There are many areas ripe
for research in the IMF's archives. And as more
documents are opened, their descriptions also will
be searchable through the online archives catalog.
The Role of Archives in
International Organizations
Archives of Development in the United Nations Secretariat:
Murky Past, Unclear Future
Bridget Sisk
Chief, Archives and Records Management Section,
United Nations Headquarters
A continuing focus is the digital preservation
imperative—planning for the long-term accessibility
and usability of authentic digital information
The Archives and Records Management Section
(ARMS) of the United Nations has three main roles:
managing records in UN offices, preserving and
providing access to records of continuing value
as archives, and providing advice and guidance
in these areas.
The UN archives have a headquarters focus,
centering on the records of the secretaries-general
and their immediate office and those of peacekeeping missions. The archives contain some
23,500 linear feet of paper records as well as
thousands of photographs, historical maps, reels
of microfilm, and drawings and blueprints of UN
facilities. There are also electronic archives. UN
archives and records are available for use by both
academic researchers and the general public.
Records generally are accessible 20 years after
being created; those that are strictly confidential
require declassification.
At the core of the development-related archives
in ARMS are the records of the United Nations
Department of Economic and Social Affairs and
its predecessors—primarily technical assistance
project files. Other development-related collections
are the archives of the United Nations Children's
Fund, United Nations Development Programme,
and United Nations Population Fund. The influence
that some of the most important economists at the
United Nations had on development thinking was
traced by a 2005 exhibition from the UN archives,
accompanied by an exhibit catalogue published as
part of Reflections on United Nations Development
Ideas (Geneva: United Nations, 2007).
A continuing focus is the digital preservation
imperative—planning for the long-term accessibility
and usability of authentic digital information. By
2015 the UN Secretariat is to be paperless. ARMS
is participating in Secretariat-wide efforts to develop
digital preservation capability—to protect against
the risk of being unable to operate efficiently
and effectively because the digital information is
inaccessible or unusable.
Session Chair
Célestin Monga
Senior Adviser, Development Economics, World Bank
Célestin Monga, a Cameroonian national, is a senior adviser at the World Bank,
where he has held positions in both operations and the research department,
including as a lead economist in the Europe and Central Asia Region and manager
of the Policy Review team in the Development Economics Vice Presidency. He
has also served on the board of directors of the Sloan School of Management's
Fellows Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and taught
economics at Boston University and the University of Bordeaux. Prior to joining the
World Bank, he was a department head and manager in the Banque Nationale de
Paris group. He was the economics editor of the five-volume New Encyclopedia
of Africa (Charles Scribners & Sons, 2007). His books have been translated into
several languages and are widely used as teaching tools by academic institutions
around the world. He holds degrees from MIT, Harvard, and the universities of Paris
1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Bordeaux, and Pau.
Exploring Archives on the Role of
Development Practitioners:
S ession 5
• Teresa Tomas Rangil—United Nations Economic and Technical Assistance during the
Congo Crisis, 1960–64
• Stephanie Decker—Translating Theory into Practice: The World Bank's Economic
Advisers in Ghana, 1960–85
• Gareth Austin—History, Archives, and Development Policy in Africa
• Keith Breckenridge—From Parliamentary Accountability to Records Management: The
Decline of Archival Authority in 20th-Century South Africa
United Nations Economic and Technical Assistance during
the Congo Crisis, 1960–64
Teresa Tomás Rangil
Junior Research Fellow, Jesus College, University of Oxford
Archival sources and oral history on technical assistance programs in
the newly independent Congo reveal a large gap between design and
The accession to independence of the Republic
of the Congo (today, the Democratic Republic of
Congo) on June 30, 1960, entailed the transfer of
the country's financial and economic institutions
from Belgian to Congolese rule. To facilitate the
coordination of this transfer, the United Nations
provided economic, financial, and technical assistance to the Congolese authorities with the help
of the International Monetary Fund. The task was
not easy: the country was undergoing serious
difficulties, with a decline in production output,
a widening trade gap and falling exchange rate,
exploding government deficits, and rising unemployment and inflation rates. The problems were soon
complicated by the sudden massive departure of
Belgian officials and technicians; the secession
of the provinces of Katanga, Kasai, and Équateur;
the collapse of most means of transportation and
communication; and ethnic and tribal warfare.
From 1960 to 1964, in the midst of these
difficult circumstances, international experts from
the United Nations and the International Monetary
Fund undertook tasks that included liquidating
the formerly Belgian-controlled Banque Centrale
du Congo Belge et du Ruanda-Urundi and drafting
the statutes for a new Congolese national bank,
revising the regulation of the exchange rate for the
Congolese franc and of import-export transactions
through the establishment of a foreign exchange
office and an import licensing office, and assisting
in drafting and negotiating a balanced budget.
These tasks were informed by the theoretical
debates of the 1960s within the development
community—debates relating to fiscal federalism,
currency unification, and monetary and budgetary
This paper contrasts the theoretical analyses
and policy advice given by experts with the difficulties of the actual implementation of these
recommendations "on the ground." Using archival
sources and oral history, I reconstruct the life of
policy officials and their circles as well as the
material living conditions of the UN development
workers in the Congo, their interactions with local
Exploring Archives on the Role
of Development Practitioners:
authorities and the Congolese population, and
the way in which these circumstances influenced
their work.
The paper begins by retracing the design of the
civilian operations mission at the UN headquarters
in New York and Léopoldville (today, Kinshasa) by
the so-called Congo circle led by Dag Hammarskjöld
and then U Thant, the members of the Monetary
Council, and the Commission pour le redressement
économique du Congo. The analysis focuses on
the ideas that guided the transfer of the economic
and financial institutional arrangements from the
colonial ruler to the new government.
The paper then follows the experiences from
1962 to 1964 of the technical assistance team
charged with implementing policies "in the field."
As soon became evident, there was a huge gap
between the design of the technical assistance
programs and their execution. The paper analyzes
the relevance of this gap for the subsequent development of a more professional economic expertise
in the United Nations. The paper concludes with
a methodological reflection on the use of oral
histories to understand complex development
and relief operations, contrasting it with the use
of printed archival sources.
Like the United Nations, the Bank was deeply concerned
about the changes in the Congo, and the Bank and the
United Nations shared information. This memo from the
United Nations financial adviser in the Congo to the United
Nations special adviser for civilian affairs in the Congo was
shared with the Bank. Victor Umbricht to Sir Alexander
MacFarquhar, March 27, 1961; Congo – Fact Finding Study
by I.B.R.D., Material received from the U.N.; WB IBRD/IDA
01 Country Operational Files, 1946-1998; 183285B; World
Bank Group Archives
Translating Theory into Practice: The World Bank's
Economic Advisers in Ghana, 1960–85
Stephanie Decker
Senior Lecturer in International Business, Aston Business School
The World Bank's earlier experience in Ghana showed a tendency to
prioritize theoretical knowledge over contextual, practical know-how
The World Bank's relationship with Ghana had been
politically difficult since the inception of the Volta
River Project in 1957. Initially advisers were individuals directly appointed by political leaders, but
in the early 1970s the World Bank reinvented itself
as a development agency and began to provide
economic advice on a large scale. Throughout the
1970s military regimes controlled the Ghanaian
economy, which suffered from overvalued exchange
rates, widespread corruption, and smuggling.
At the time the World Bank, under Robert
McNamara, took a laissez-faire approach. This
changed during the 1980s, which became known
as the era of Structural Adjustment. While Ghana
underwent intense economic crisis and political
upheaval, the country became one of the first
exponents of a successful Structural Adjustment
Program in Africa. Yet behind this dramatic turnaround the work of the resident economic advisers
was crucial, as they mediated World Bank policy
within the local context of African politics.
This paper illustrates the difficulty of translating economic theories and political intentions
into acceptable programs that can work for local
recipients, an aspect of the work of development
practitioners not often considered. It furthermore
argues that episodes like this one show the specific ways in which organizations view their own
knowledge base, what kind of knowledge they seek
to transfer, and how.
Exploring Archives on the Role
of Development Practitioners:
Surprisingly, the World Bank appeared to replicate some of the limitations seen in the individual
advisers of earlier decades—especially the failure
to adequately translate theory into practice—
despite its superior resources. This is important
because it shows a limited concept of knowledge,
specifically the tendency to prioritize theoretical
knowledge over contextual, practical know-how. As
this problem persisted over time, it also showed a
failure of organizational memory and social learning. The paper argues that this lack of awareness by
the World Bank of its past actions and limitations
contributed not only to the failure to identify the
problem within organizational practices, but also
to the substantial criticism the Bank faced with
respect to how Structural Adjustment Programs
were implemented in poor countries.
Beginning in 1972, separate filing centers were maintained
for the records of World Bank regional operations. This item
used by Decker is from the records of the Africa Regional
Office. J. R. Peberdy to Nicolas A. Gibbs, January 10, 1983;
Ghana, LEAP General; West Africa, General Country Files,
1971-1983; WB IBRD/IDA 05 Records of the Africa Regional
Office; 191629B; World Bank Group Archives
History, Archives, and Development Policy in Africa
Gareth Austin
Professor of African and Comparative Economic History, Graduate Institute of
International and Development Studies, Geneva
A historical approach takes time seriously—seeking to disentangle
continuities and changes and analyze events in their temporally specific
This paper discusses how the study of African
history (economic and otherwise) and an awareness of African historiography (written from various
disciplinary backgrounds) may help us think about
development policy in the context of Sub-Saharan Africa. In illustrating the uses of a historical
approach, I mean one that takes time seriously—
seeking to disentangle continuities and changes
and analyze events in their temporally specific
Economic development in Sub-Saharan Africa
has been a very long-term, cumulative, and pathdependent struggle, in an originally land-abundant
but not resource-rich environment, to mitigate the
multiple constraints (especially by successive,
selective adoptions of imported crops). This
development path has been characterized by,
among other things, a preference for land-extensive
techniques in agriculture and, until well into the
20th century, the use of various forms of coercion
to reduce the price of labor. In recent decades much
of the region has moved toward land scarcity and
labor abundance. A cheaper and better-educated
labor force raises the possibility of some form
of labor-intensive manufacturing. But some of
the physical constraints, notably thin and easily
eroded layers of soil nutrients, continue to impose
costs and policy dilemmas about the necessary
transition to intensive agriculture.
African "history lessons" for development policy
include the significance of changes of context for
debates about the economic efficiency of particular
institutions, for example, in land tenure; the importance of politics—as distinct from institutions—for
development outcomes; and the need to counter
overgeneralizations about the cultural contexts of
entrepreneurship. Western "myths of origin" are
a misleading guide to current development; more
nuanced historical perspectives are required.
A historical approach highlights the sequence
in which changes occurred, which matters when
the changes tend to be conflated in retrospect,
thereby confusing the determinants involved. Since
the end of the Cold War, many governments and
international organizations have hailed the complementarity of market economies and multiparty
democracy. It is salutary to recall, however, that
in Africa the shift toward the former (Structural
Adjustment) distinctly preceded the latter. In Ghana
and Nigeria, for example, economic liberalization
Exploring Archives on the Role
of Development Practitioners:
received democratic legitimation, but only after it
was a fait accompli.
Another example in the paper concerns the
frequent assumption that African leaders are
purely self-interested and often incompetent.
The historian's attention to the constraints under
which decisions were made, to the perceptions
and contexts of the time, is conducive to taking
African leaders seriously, rather than seeing
them as, at best, mere individualist maximizers
responding to incentive structures over which they
have little control.
There is still no systematic general survey
of postindependence archives in Africa. But my
own limited observations in archives in Nigeria,
The Gambia, and (more extensively) Ghana are
somewhat pessimistic. The culture of filing and
preserving records within the offices that generated
them has not been consistently maintained since
independence. Where kept, records often have
not been regularly transferred to the archives.
Comparing colonial and postcolonial records in the
Ghana national archives, I am struck by the much
lower density of the latter and the fact that a much
higher proportion of the postcolonial materials are
copies of published documents and a much lower
proportion are correspondence files.
Correspondence files are generally the most
promising window on how decisions were made:
The Bank recognizes the need to strengthen archival programs in Africa. As part of Uganda's Bank-funded Public
Service Performance Enhancement Project, a new records
and archives center will be built. World Bank. 2006. Uganda—Public Service Performance Enhancement Project:
resettlement plan. s.l. ; s.n. http://documents.worldbank
on the perceptions that informed them, the interests and ideals that the individuals and groups
involved sought to mobilize, and to what effect.
There is a tendency among some economists
to equate causal determination with statistical
tests of causality. But when it comes to decision
making, reliance on such tests leads to circular
reasoning: the assumption that outcomes must
have been those intended.
From Parliamentary Accountability to Records
Management: The Decline of Archival Authority in
20th-Century South Africa
Keith Breckenridge
Historian, Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the
The public archives and official record keeping have fallen into disrepair in
South Africa. Is restoring parliamentary oversight the solution?
The public archives and the work of official record
keeping have fallen into notorious disrepair in
contemporary South Africa. Shortages of skills,
of funds not already earmarked for salaries, of
competent and tenacious managers, and, perhaps most importantly, of trust have battered
the provincial and national archive services over
the past decade. In addition, the public activities
of the National Department of Arts and Culture
suggest that the leaders of the African National
Congress (ANC) much prefer the mute testimony
of the monuments and artifacts of a moribund
nationalism to the labyrinthine, and sometimes
racially derogatory, testimony of the country's
archival record.
There is a noticeable disinterest in the new
tools of digital government that might be applied to
official records that stands in contrast to the ANC
government's otherwise enthusiastic embrace of
computerized administrative solutions. It would be
entirely within the general pattern of governance
over the past decade—as in the provision of welfare
or the building of roads—for the archive service
to outsource the digitization of all state records
to one of the large international information technology corporations. That this has not happened
can be traced in significant part to the ignominious
account that South African scholars and archivists
have offered of archival work—particularly digital
archives—over the past decade.
In short, many South African scholars have
adopted what can usefully be described as the
Chicago view—following the work of Bernard
Cohn, Nick Dirks, Arjun Appadurai, and Dipesh
Chakrabarty—that the official archive is an instrument of imperial and colonial control. And this
view has strongly influenced national policy. It is
important to acknowledge that there is real power
to the Chicago argument. But as I show in this
paper, the claim is a significant simplification of
the primary purpose of the archival record over
the past two centuries, and one that has had
especially damaging effects on public arguments
about the political work of accountability in the
official record.
Exploring Archives on
the Role of Development
Practitioners: Africa
The South African colonial archives, like British
public records in general, were heavily shaped by
the requirements of presenting official records to
Parliament in London. Two imperial problems—
the government of India and the abolition of the
slave trade—were central to the development of
the system of regularly published papers by the
parliamentary printer, Luke Hansard and sons, in
the century after 1774. In this paper I examine
Edmund Burke's prosecution of Warren Hastings
for corruption in the government of the affairs of
the East India Company and Dirks's recent effort
to present it as an apology for empire. I show
that the requirement of parliamentary accountability, initiated by Burke and deployed against
key imperial representatives in South Africa such
as Theophilus Shepstone and Alfred Milner, was
the only meaningful restraint on an otherwise
despotic bureaucracy.
This remains the case today. Restoring parliamentary oversight of the official archives—as an
act of sovereignty, not heritage—would fix much of
what is currently broken in official record keeping
in South Africa.
Archives in institutions such as the World Bank can supplement archives in states where the archives are incomplete.
This "mission diary" of a World Bank mission in May 1957
to examine the "creditworthiness" of South Africa includes
reports of discussions with a dozen government officials,
including future prime minister H. F. Verwoerd. Mission diary,
May 11, 1957; South Africa, Mission Diary; WB IBRD/IDA
01 Country Operational Files, 1946-1998; 171918B; World
Bank Group Archives
Session Chair
Gianni Toniolo
Research Professor of Economics and History, Duke University, and Professor of
Economic History, Libera Universita delle Scienze Sociali (Rome)
Gianni Toniolo is a research professor of economics and history at Duke University
and a professor of economic history at the Libera Universita delle Scienze Sociali
(Rome). He is a research fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research
(London), a member of the European Academy, and a coeditor of Rivista di Storia
Economica. Previously he was a professor of economics at the universities of
Roma Tor Vergata and Venice; held visiting professorships at the universities of
Connecticut, California (Berkeley), and Hitotsubashi (Tokyo); and was a visiting
fellow at St. Antony's College and All Souls College, Oxford. His research interests
focus on European economic growth in the 19th and 20th centuries and on the
history of money, finance, and central banking. His books in English include The
Oxford Handbook of the Italian Economy since Unification (Oxford University Press,
2013), The World Economy between the Wars (with C. H. Feinstein and P. Temin;
Oxford University Press, 2008), The Global Economy in the 1990s: A Long-Run
Perspective (with Paul Rhode; Cambridge University Press, 2006), Central Bank
Cooperation at the Bank for International Settlements (Cambridge University Press,
2005), Economic Growth in Europe since 1945 (with N. Crafts; Cambridge University
Press, 1996), and An Economic History of Liberal Italy (Routledge, 1990).
The United Kingdom,
the United States, and
the World Bank's
Development Policy
Session 6
• Simon Szreter—The Archival History of Britain and Its Dialogue with Development
Policy during the World Bank Era, circa 1945 to the Present
• Alexander Field—What the Developing World Can Learn from the Economic History of
the United States—and Vice Versa
The Archival History of Britain and Its Dialogue with
Development Policy during the World Bank Era, circa 1945
to the Present
Simon Szreter
Professor of History and Public Policy, University of Cambridge
Findings about the course of British demographic history have turned
upside down our earlier postwar models of economic growth
British historical development has in many ways
been used as a paradigm case for models of economic development that have been highly influential
in the international policy world throughout the
postwar era—an era during which the World Bank
has been the major global player in and user of
this applied historical knowledge. From Rostovian
takeoff and incremental capital-output ratio (ICOR)
models of growth so popular in the 1950s and
1960s and the demographic and epidemiological
transition models that are still influential today,
through to the Washington Consensus neoliberal
paradigm of the 1990s and the current focus on
the importance of rule of law and getting institutions right, readings of history—in particular a
dialogue with British history—have often been a
highly influential factor.
The unusual degree of influence of this one
country's history on our thinking about economic
development of course partly reflects appreciation
of its importance as the first national economy to
achieve self-sustaining and industrializing economic
growth and partly reflects its widespread influence
across the globe as the leading trading and maritime power throughout much of the modern period
since 1700. From a practical and professional
historians' point of view, however, it undoubtedly
also reflects the extraordinary richness of surviving
documentation about economic, social, and demographic affairs throughout the past millennium in a
country that has never been conquered or occupied
throughout that long period during which written
documentation of all the affairs of governance,
law, and the economy has existed.
An era of documentary government began
immediately following that moment of final conquest in 1066, in that the conqueror in question,
William of Normandy, initiated the Domesday survey, rightly recognized as a foundational document
of not only the visible state, in Jonathan Scott's
sense, but also of the archival state. Michael
Clanchy's superb classic study, From Memory
to Written Record: England 1066–1307 (London:
Edward Arnold, 1979), has laid out for us how
The United Kingdom, the
United States, and the World
Bank's Development Policy
Britain became, over the next quarter millennium,
an increasingly literate and archived society. This
process entered a new level of detail and coverage of the population under the Tudor Crown in
the 16th century with the innovation of universal
parish registration of all baptisms, marriages, and
burials, so that the entire populace was now in
existence in the archive.
It was that archived population register that
in the second half of the 20th century enabled
demographic historians working at the Cambridge
Group for the History of Population to produce a
range of important, entirely new findings about
the course of British demographic history from
about 1538 onward. These findings have turned
upside down not only demographic transition theory
but also our earlier postwar models of economic
growth. And they have provided the crucial context
for the contemporary policy focus on institutions to
become both plausible and necessary. The importance of archivally derived historical knowledge
to inform development policy is nowhere more
clearly demonstrated than in the case of British
economic history, its influence, and the capacity
to radically reinterpret its meaning that has been
shown during the past 50 years.
The United Kingdom has been a central force in Bank
operations ever since Bretton Woods. One important early
issue involving the U.K. was how the International Development Association would handle loans to "dependent
territories." In this letter an official of the Commonwealth
Relations Office explains to a member of Parliament how
aid to territories will be handled; unsatisfied, the MP sent
the letter to the Bank, asking for more information. Letter,
William C. Powell to Harold Graves, enclosing request for
information from Francis Noel-Baker and a photostat of his
letter from the Commonwealth Relations Office, March 23,
1964; IDA – Policy and Procedure – Dependent Territories –
United Kingdom; WB IBRD/IDA 02 Central Files 1946-1986;
184072B; World Bank Group Archives
What the Developing World Can Learn from the Economic
History of the United States—and Vice Versa
Alexander J. Field
Michel and Mary Orradre Professor of Economics, Santa Clara University
The United States has an enviable record of growth. But how much does
the history of the developing world stand as a cautionary note?
It is widely understood that the differences in labor
productivity and per capita output levels throughout
the world are far larger than can reasonably be
accounted for by the standard factors appealed to
in a Solow growth model—in particular, the ratio
of capital to labor or access to production technologies. During the 1990s a so-called Washington
Consensus developed that the main explanation
for these differences, and for why the entire world
wasn't rich, was differences in institutions—not
differences in culture or geographic endowments
but differences in the political systems and legal
rules governing societies and the historical processes that had given rise to them. This view
receives strong reinforcement in Daron Acemoglu
and James Robinson's Why Nations Fail: The Origins
of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown,
2012), where the authors criticize the focus on
geography or the disease environment that they
associate with such writers as Jared Diamond
or Jeffrey Sachs as well as various assertions
about culture.
In 2007, on the eve of the worst U.S. financial
crisis, one of our leading students of financial
history, Richard Sylla, had this to say: "Most
informed observers today would agree that the
United States has just about the best financial
system in the world. Its problems are newsworthy mostly because they arose in the context of
a well-functioning financial order, not one that is
disorderly" ("Reversing Financial Reversals: Government and the Financial System since 1789,"
in Government and the American Economy: A New
History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007], 115). The crisis that ensued shortly after
the publication of his essay had as its epicenter
the U.S. financial system, was associated with a
seizing up of most credit markets, and could easily
have plunged the world economy into a depression
as serious as the one that marked the 1930s. Even
with unprecedented fiscal and monetary interventions, the fallout from these events continues to
reverberate. Sylla's comment is reflective of the
potential dangers of a U.S.-centric triumphalism
in thinking about development policy.
There are other concerns. Over the past three
decades the United States has experienced a substantial increase in wealth and income inequality,
The United Kingdom, the
United States, and the World
Bank's Development Policy
and most of the gains in life expectancy have been
among the better-off. The influence of wealthy
elites on political outcomes has been reinforced
by Supreme Court decisions such as Citizens
United, which removed restrictions on independent
expenditures in political campaigns by corporations,
associations, or labor unions.
How much of the triumphalist message of the
Washington Consensus stands, even after the
travails and crises of the past decade and recent
economic and political trends? The United States
has an enviable record of economic growth and
development, particularly in the second and third
quarters of the 20th century. What underlay that
record is worth reexamining.
But how much does the history of the developing
world stand as a cautionary note? It is here that the
historical materials collected in the World Bank's
archives can be useful. Particularly useful are those
documenting the interplay of political centralization
and inclusiveness and the extent to which this
has influenced the environment and incentives for
effort, accumulation, and innovation—and their
concomitant, sustained economic growth.
The impact of the U.S. economy on the world financial system
has been a concern for the Bank from its inception. In this
letter from the beginning of the Cold War era, U.S. banker
R. C. Leffingwell tells Bank President John J. McCloy that the
U.S. must use its intelligence to avoid a great depression.
All the records of the McCloy presidency have been scanned
and are available in the "Archives" section of the Bank's
website. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTARCHIVES
Session Chair
Hassane Cissé
Deputy General Counsel, Knowledge and Research, Legal Vice Presidency,
World Bank
Hassane Cissé, a national of Senegal, joined the World Bank in 1997 after working
for many years as a lawyer at the International Monetary Fund. He has been deputy
general counsel, knowledge and research, of the Bank since 2009. In this capacity
he provides intellectual leadership on strategic legal issues facing the institution
and leads the Bank's knowledge agenda on law, justice, and development. He is
the editor in chief of the World Bank's Law, Justice, and Development Series and the
author of several papers on aspects of international economic law. He coedited the
World Bank Legal Review in 2012 and 2013.
Before taking his current position, Mr. Cissé served for many years as chief counsel
for operations policy at the World Bank, contributing to the modernization and simplification of the Bank's legal and policy framework. He also served as legal adviser
on governance and anticorruption, leading the exercise that resulted in the Bank's
adoption in 2006 of an expanded policy framework for sanctions. He was appointed in 2007 to serve as a member of the World Bank's newly established Sanctions
Mr. Cissé obtained his LLB from Dakar University in Senegal. He also holds an LLM
from Harvard Law School, graduate law degrees from the universities of Paris I
Panthéon-Sorbonne and Paris II Panthéon-Assas, and a graduate degree in history
from Paris I University.
Mr. Cissé is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on the
Rule of Law.
Sailing Back to the Future:
History and Policy
Making at the World Bank
Session 7
• Frank Fariello—History and Policy Making at the World Bank: The Evolving Approach
to Governance Issues
• Alessandra Iorio—The International Development Association and Debt Relief
• Vikram Raghavan and Aristedis Panou—The World Bank's Mediation of Disputes
History and Policy Making at the World Bank: The Evolving
Approach to Governance Issues
Frank Fariello
Lead Counsel, Operations Policy, Legal Vice Presidency, World Bank
Archival research has played a key role in guiding the evolving legal
thinking on the World Bank's approach to governance issues
The World Bank's Articles of Agreement are its
foundational documents, operating as a kind of
constitutional law guiding its policies and operations. The Executive Directors are the ultimate
interpreters of the articles. But they have come to
rely on the Bank's general counsel to advise them
on the proper interpretation, and their endorsement
of, or concurrence with, the views of the general
counsel signals their acceptance that such views,
expressed in legal opinions, legal notes, or legal
memoranda, are a distinct source of the Bank's
Among the most crucial provisions of the articles for Bank policies are those setting out the
purposes of the Bank and those prohibiting the
Bank from interfering in the political affairs of its
members, the so-called political prohibition. These
provisions, which delimit the scope of the Bank's
work, have been a focus of a series of legal opinions of the Bank's general counsels since 1990,
including Ibrahim Shihata's 1990 legal memorandum on governance, his 1995 legal opinion on the
political prohibition, the 2004 legal note by Ko-Yung
Tung and 2005 legal note by Roberto Dañino on
the Bank's activities in anti–money laundering and
combating the financing of terrorism, the 2009
guidance note on multistakeholder engagement
under the Bank's governance and anticorruption
strategy, and the 2012 legal note on engagement
in the criminal justice sector by Anne-Marie Leroy.
The 1990 Shihata legal memorandum provided
the seminal legal thinking on the Bank's governance
and anticorruption work. This document relied on
archival materials to understand the legislative
history surrounding the relevant passages in the
articles, including the statements of Lord Keynes
and other drafters of the articles, the proceedings
of the Bretton Woods conference, and the congressional hearings relating to the U.S. ratification of
the articles. The memorandum also reflects "data
mining" of Bank records undertaken to understand
how these passages have been interpreted and
applied. Through analysis of this archival research,
the 1990 memorandum achieved two intellectual
breakthroughs: It placed many governance and
anticorruption issues within the Bank's purposes
and mandate, something that had been a subject
of some doubt. And it reframed the issue of what
is political and what is economic, a key distinction
in the articles that defines the border separating
the impermissible from the permissible.
Sailing Back to the Future:
History and Policy Making
at the World Bank
The result was a purposive interpretation of the
articles that helped create an enabling environment
at the Bank for its governance and anticorruption
activities that remains the basic framework for
those activities today. At the same time, the 1990
memorandum set important boundaries that are
still valid, excluding work with political parties and
political reforms.
In one important area, however, the legal thinking has evolved significantly since Shihata's day:
engagement with the criminal justice sector. This
evolution culminated in Leroy's 2012 legal note.
Law and order had been one of the areas that
Shihata had excluded from the Bank's mandate
in 1990. But the 2012 note, employing the same
research techniques as Shihata had, came to a
different conclusion in light of the Bank's experience
in governance over the intervening 22 years and
the evolving understanding of the development
rationale for work in the criminal justice sector.
Once again, the archives played a critical role
in documenting the Bank's experience and tracing its evolving legal thinking. Shihata's original
analysis was as critical in 2012 as it had been in
1990. But a close reading of the historical record
allowed us to refine the original legal test in a way
that reconciled the articles' requirements with the
Bank's actual practice, as well as its evolving legal
thinking, over the years. The result, once again,
World Bank Vice President and General Counsel Ibrahim
Shihata explains the details of his memo entitled "Issues
of governance in the borrowing members: the extent of
their relevance under the Bank's Articles of Agreement,"
which is, Fariello explains, the seminal legal thinking in
the Bank on governance and anticorruption issues. World
Bank. 1991. The IBRD seminar of Executive Directors was
held on 11th April, 1991. Washington D.C. - The Worldbank.
has been a purposive interpretation that creates
an enabling environment for the Bank's work.
The International Development Association and Debt Relief
Alessandra Iorio
Chief Counsel, Concessional Finance, Legal Vice Presidency, World Bank
Could the International Development Association provide debt relief?
Analysis of the question included looking at archival records of the early
thinking about the issue
In the 1990s, facing increasing pressure from civil
society, the World Bank considered whether it was
able to provide debt relief to its poorest clients.
The starting point for lawyers is always to look at
what the rules say—and in this case that meant
looking at what the Articles of Agreement of the
International Development Association (IDA) allow.
IDA's articles set the following parameters: IDA
can make loans. It can also make grants in certain
circumstances. And it may agree to a relaxation or
other modification in the terms of its financing. So
the question really turned on whether debt relief
can be viewed as a relaxation or other modification
of terms. The question came up in two phases.
In the 1990s a campaign called Jubilee 2000
sought cancellation of all world debt by the year
2000. Notable supporters included Bono and Bob
Geldof. In the late 1990s the Heavily Indebted Poor
Countries (HIPC) Initiative was enhanced, with a
proposal to forgive a portion of debt service for
heavily indebted countries as it fell due.
Could IDA provide partial debt relief? The
analysis involved looking at the provisions of IDA's
articles and analyzing the ordinary meaning and
intended meaning of the language used. For the
intended meaning, we went to the World Bank's
archives and looked at the detailed memoranda
of the meetings of the Financial Policy Committee
of the International Bank for Reconstruction and
Development (IBRD), which had been tasked with
drafting IDA's articles in the late 1950s.
Looking at the history, we found that the Canadian representative at these meetings had asked
whether the language in the articles on relaxation
or other modification would cover forgiveness of
debt. The Bank's then general counsel replied that
while the interpretation of the language could be
stretched to forgiving debt, this would not be a
normal interpretation. The Dutch representative
thought that this section might open the way to
switch from loans to grants. There was no recorded
response to this statement.
Sailing Back to the Future:
History and Policy Making
at the World Bank
So the drafters of the articles had clearly
thought about the issue but left it open. The
articles also provide that if there is a question
of interpretation of any of the provisions of the
articles, the Executive Directors can be asked to
formally interpret the articles. This was the path
that was pursued, and the Executive Directors
found that partial debt relief was permissible
under the articles.
At the G-8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005, the
G-8 agreed to forgive the balance of the HIPC debt
under what is known as the Multilateral Debt Relief
Initiative (MDRI). This debt forgiveness would result
in IDA writing off about US$37 billion from its
balance sheet. There were concerns expressed by
other shareholders about a much weakened IDA.
We knew the history at that point. We'd also
created some of our own history in 2000 by
allowing partial debt relief. After a highly charged
political process, the Executive Directors were again
asked to formally interpret the articles, to allow
100 percent debt relief for the HIPC countries—
which they did. As part of the MDRI package, the
G-8 and other IDA donors committed to provide
dollar-for-dollar compensation to IDA for the MDRI
over the next 40 years.
World Bank Presidents Black's speech at the 1959
Annual Meetings in the 1959 Summary Proceedings
shows him grappling with the formation of IDA. World
Bank. 1959. 1959 annual meetings of the Boards of
Governors : summary proceedings. Washington D.C. - The
Worldbank. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated
The World Bank's Mediation of Disputes
Vikram Raghavan
Aristedis Panou
Lead Counsel, Legal Vice
Presidency, World Bank
Associate Counsel, Legal Vice
Presidency, World Bank
The World Bank's noteworthy mediation efforts relating to the Indus River
dispute are richly reflected in the institution's archives
The Indus Basin
dispute reached a
crisis in early 1953.
These handwritten
notes, taken by
Hector Prud'homme during a meeting between Bank
President Eugene
Black and India's
B. K. Nehru, give
the flavor of the
tension; they were
filed "since they are
more detailed than
the memo to Mr.
Sommers." Hector Prud'homme notes of Eugene Black
meetings with B. K. Nehru, March 9, 10, and 27, 1953;
General Negotiations 1953 (III), India-Pakistan I.B.D. [Indus
Basin Dispute]; WB IBRD/IDA 01, Country Operational Files,
1946-1998, World Bank Group Archives
Besides financing international development, the
World Bank has mediated international disputes
among member countries. Its involvement in three
such disputes is particularly significant. Early in its
history the Bank attempted, albeit unsuccessfully,
to bridge differences between Iran and the United
Kingdom over the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian
Oil Company. Subsequently the Bank grappled
with the economic dimensions of the Suez Crisis,
involving Egypt and some Western countries.
But possibly the most noteworthy example
of the Bank's mediation efforts relates to the
Indus River dispute between India and Pakistan.
The subcontinent's partition in 1947 left the two
countries at loggerheads over their sharing of
the Indus River's waters. For more than a decade
the Bank's engineers, lawyers, and economists
worked closely with their Indian and Pakistani
counterparts to resolve the matter. It took the
personal involvement of Eugene Black, the Bank's
then president, to reach a solution acceptable to
both sides. That solution was embodied in the
Indus Waters Treaty, signed in 1960. As part of
the deal, the Bank committed substantial aid for
the construction of storage dams and irrigation
facilities along the river.
The Bank's archives include vast and extensive
files on all three disputes. The Indus collection is
particularly important. It is filled with interesting
engineering reports, a large number of maps,
technical memos, and legal notes. Both India and
Pakistan have consulted the collection in technical
discussions and arbitral proceedings with each
other over the treaty's provisions.
Closing Remarks
Tony Addison
Chief Economist and Deputy Director, World Institute for Development Economics
Tony Addison is chief economist and deputy director of the United Nations
University's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER)
in Helsinki, Finland. He was previously a professor of development studies at the
University of Manchester; executive director of the Brooks World Poverty Institute at
the University of Manchester (2006–09); associate director of the Chronic Poverty
Research Centre; and deputy director of UNU-WIDER. His books include From
Conflict to Recovery in Africa (Oxford University Press), Making Peace Work: The
Challenges of Economic and Social Reconstruction (Palgrave Macmillan), and
Poverty Dynamics: A Cross-Disciplinary Perspective (Oxford University Press). He
was a lead author of The Chronic Poverty Report 2008–09: Escaping Poverty Traps.
"It is vital for the Bank to have a sense of its history, invest in
its own historians, and encourage its operational staff to really
engage. But the Bank also needs external historians and others
who are independent—because there is a need for high-quality
historical analysis. Whether good or bad, it is dangerous to have
the practitioner write the history of what happened."
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