World Bank

World Bank.

The World Bank is the World’s foremost intergovernmental organization concerned with the external financing of the economic growth of developing countries. The official title of the institution is the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD).

Before recommending a Bank loan, the staff of the Bank must be reasonably satisfied that the productivity of the borrowing country will be increased and that the prospects for repayment are good. A country must be judged creditworthy. Engineering investigations are frequently carried out to determine the probable relation of a proposed project to benefits and costs. Increasingly, however, the Bank has shifted somewhat away from project lending (e.g., for a dam or a highway or a port); it has become concerned with education and other human services, the environment, and through structural adjustment loans, the modification of governmental policies that are thought to have impeded long-run growth. The Bank has also paid increasing attention to the evaluation of previous lending. Recently, moreover, it has acceded to the requests of the American secretary of the treasury to help to ease the huge, outstanding, largely commercial bank debt.

Voting power in the Bank (as well as in the Fund) is determined by the size of each member nation’s subscription. Subscriptions, in turn, are based on a formula that takes into account such variables as the value of each nation’s foreign trade and its total output. Ultimate power, through weighted voting, rests with the Board of Governors of the Bank(and the Fund). The governors meet annually in September. The day-to-day affairs of the Bank are determined however, by executive directors who live permanently in Washington, D.C. They hire a president, who, in turn, hires a staff. By tradition, rather than law, the president of the Bank is an American, usually a banker, proposed by the president of the United States.

Because of the size of their subscriptions, five nations – the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and France – are entitled to appoint executive directors; the remaining seventeen directors are elected by some combination of the votes of the other nations. There are 156 member nations, but, with the independence of the Baltic states and the devolution of the Soviet Union into separate republics, the membership could increase to over 170, thereby including all the independent nations in the world.

The Soviet Union was one of the forty-four governments whose representatives signed the original Bretton Woods agreements, but along with the other members of the Warsaw Pact, it chose not to join the Bank or the Fund when these organizations were formally incorporated in 1946. (Poland and Czechoslovakia joined the Bank and the Fund initially but withdrew when the cold war began in earnest and a loan to Poland was blocked by the United States).