Reforming the World Bank Tenty Years of Trial - and Error [Hardcover]

This book explains why the World Bank has not achieved substantive efficiency or effectiveness in delivering economic assistance.The aim of this book is to look at the World Bank as an organization and to ask whether twenty years of reforms have improved its efficiency and effectiveness in delivering economic assistance. Efficient organization is a precondition for effective delivery of foreign assistance, and despite years of costly reforms there is reason to conclude that the Bank still has not achieved this.The aim of this book is to look at the World Bank as an organization and to ask whether twenty years of reforms have improved its efficiency and effectiveness in delivering economic assistance. Efficient organization is a precondition for effective delivery of foreign assistance, and despite years of costly reforms there is reason to conclude that the Bank still has not achieved this.In the many studies of the World Bank a critical issue has been missed. While writers have looked at the Banks political economy, lending, conditions, advice, ownership and accounting for issues such as the environment, this study looks at the Bank as an organization  whether it is set up to do the job it is supposed to do and, if not, what should be done about it. The book is about the problems of organization and reorganization as much as it is about the problems of assisting third-world development, and it is a case study in flawed organizational reform as much as a critique of the way development assistance is managed. It covers the period that starts at the time of the first major reorganization, in 1987 under President Barber Conable, and ends at the time of the resignation of Paul Wolfowitz, in 2007, but it focuses especially on what happened during the tenure of James Wolfensohn.Part I. Origins and Evolution: 1. What does the World Bank do and how does it do it?; 2. The emerging critique; Part II. The Search for Effectiveness: 3. Fifty years of bank reforms; 4. The 1990sl£J