• The Global Transparency Resource
• Importance of Transparency
• IFI's Introduced
  • AfDB - African Development Bank
  • ADB - Asian Development Bank
  • BIS - Bank for International Settlements
  • BSTDB - Black Sea Trade and Development Bank
  • CDB - Caribbean Development Bank
  • CEB - Council of Europe Development Bank
  • EBRD - European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
  • ECB - European Central Bank
  • EIB - European Investment Bank
  • IADB - Inter-American Development Bank
  • IFC - International Finance Corporation
  • IMF - International Monetary Fund
  • IsDB - Islamic Development Bank
  • OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
  • WB - World Bank
  • WTO - World Trade Organisation

WB World Bank (Washington DC, United States of America)

The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing nations. The goal is to help reduce poverty however in many cases they have failed miserably at this. The bank has had to deal with a lot of criticism, much of it justified that it is not really looking out for the best interests of the nations that it is supposed to be helping.

The World Bank exists to provide money to developing countries in order to pay for infrastructure that is needed for their development. The stated goal of the bank is to reduce poverty however the rules of the bank only allow money to be lent to nations that promote foreign investment and international trade. In many cases these are not necessarily the best ways to reduce poverty. This is just one of the many criticisms that have been leveled at the bank over the years.

The World Bank is a little bit different in the way that it lends money compared to the other development banks that are out there. The difference is that rather than lending on a project by project basis the bank actually creates a strategy for each nation that they are lending to. In effect they are telling nations what to do in order to achieve economic growth. This means that a lot of the loans come with conditions attached to them. Far and away this is the biggest criticism of the World Bank, in many cases they take decision making power away from the governments that they are helping. This is especially problematic since one of the goals they are supposed to be promoting is democracy. It can hardly be called democracy if the government are being told what to do by the World Bank.

There have been a lot of other criticisms of the World Bank the main ones are that they often require structural adjustments to an economy before they will lend money. In many cases these adjustments will only succeed in making things worse. The policy that trade and private enterprise must always be a part of any nations development plan is another problem since many countries are not ready for this kind of economy.

The main problem that the World Bank has which has caused so many of its problems is that it has competing objectives. On the one hand it is a development bank with the goal of helping poor countries to build infrastructure. However it is also a political body and it has to deal with that as well. The biggest issue is that the World Bank is dominated by the developed Western nations and they tend to make policy that is in their own best interests. They also tend to focus on economic policies that have worked for them, whether they are appropriate for a developing country or not.