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We estimate the impact on economic growth of the joint participation in both IMF and World Bank programs. More specifically, using panel data for 128 developing countries over the period 1982–2005, and employing 2SLS to control for the possible endogeneity of participation in an IMF/World Bank program, we find that the interaction between these two organizations has a positive and significant impact on growth. The paper then opens up interesting new research questions related to investigate further on the effects of Bank–Fund simultaneous action and, to the extent to which their stronger impact on growth may depend on Bank–Fund interaction, also ways to optimize their joint effect through greater cooperation.

Rural electrification can have many benefits-not only bringing lighting, but improving the quality of health care, spreading information and supporting productive enterprises. The extent of these benefits has been questioned, arguing that they may be insufficient to justify the investment costs. This book quantifies these benefits. It finds that the benefits can indeed be high, substantially outweighing the costs, and that consumer willingness to pay is generally sufficient to achieve financial sustainability. However, benefits could be increased further by providing smart subsidies to assist connections for poorer households, promote productive uses and further consumer education.

This report reviews World Bank support to Egypt from fiscal 1999 through fiscal 2007. It analyzes the objectives and content of the Bank’s assistance program during this period. The Bank’s assistance program largely met its objectives and contributed significantly to policy and institutional changes, especially in the financial sector, privatization, pension system, and private sector development. From FY99 to FY07, the Bank committed just 2.1 billion for 18 investment projects and one policy-based loan. Bank analytical work has helped in the design of recent economic reforms and in monitoring poverty. The Bank’s long-term partnership in irrigation and water management has contributed to recent increases in agriculture productivity and exports. Bank efforts in rural finance have been less successful. The Bank has also contributed to improvements in Egypt’s human development indicators. Future Bank strategy needs to reflect Egypt’s middle-income status by including a flexible lending program and an emphasis on knowledge services, including reimbursable technical assistance. The Bank can further strengthen the partnership by focusing on (i) poverty and inequality; (ii) analytic work on macroeconomic analysis and income disparities and its improved dissemination; (iii) further financial sector reforms and indirectly combating corruption; and (iv) sectoral strategies and policy and institutional reforms in infrastructure and energy.

A well-known approach to modeling international relations treats them as a two-level game played by national governments and international organizations, in which they negotiate with one another while coping with internal constraints on their action posed by domestic politics or organizational governance. Officials in these organizations can play a different two-level game, arising from their simultaneous negotiations within their personal transnational networks and their official duties in their host organizations. In each domain, they can act in ways that improves their outcomes in the other one - informal understandings facilitate subsequent formal agreement, while actions taken within their organizations implement and cement what had been negotiated informally. Multi-organizational innovation can thus be coordinated even in the absence of formal action to do so. This process is illustrated through an examination of the role of an informal transnational network in the shifting of the policies of the government of India and major aid donors in the 1960s.

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending, borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have chimed, \"this time is different\"--claiming that the old rules of valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or how little--we have learned.

This article analyzes whether and to what extent reliance on conditionality is appropriate to guarantee the revolving character of the resources of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The paper presents theoretical arguments in favor of conditionality, and those against the use of conditions. It summarizes the track record of program implementation and discusses the evidence of factors determining implementation. Whether proponents or critics of conditionality can be supported by existing data analysis is also investigated, as is the success of conditionality in terms of outcomes. The final section draws policy implications.

How and why do the policy areas covered in World Bank loan conditions change over time and across borrowers? We hypothesize that shifts in the Bank’s economic research and policy priorities influence Bank loan conditions, even after controlling for country characteristics and international political aspects. To test this claim we apply keyword-assisted topic models to the analysis of over 13,000 World Bank policy loan conditions and close to 35,000 World Bank research papers published between 1985 and 2014. Contrary to the criticism levelled against the Bank that changes in research and policy priorities are mostly rhetorical and have little substantive effect on Bank lending, we find that internal research and policy priority shifts explain the conditions in a Bank loan at least as well as more traditional donor or borrower-specific measures central to IPE models of Bank lending.

The World Bank is a leading global institution for disaster risk management, the bulk of which is dedicated to flood risk management (FRM). Due to the Bank's power as a lending agency and the global distribution of flood risks it has addressed, the Bank's project financial agreements (FAs) are an expression of a power relationship worthy of detailed investigation. These FAs present an opportunity in which the Bank could impose its policy preferences and set the parameters for FRM in recipient countries, thus illuminating both an important driver for change and the Bank's fundamental modus vivendi. This paper uses qualitative content analysis to investigate 52 FAs from 1975 to 2023, searching for patterns in the FRM measures they emphasise. We examine how FRM measures advocated by the Bank have changed over time, finding that the Bank has used its power to promote early adoption of integrated structural and non‐structural FRM strategies in a mutually reinforcing complementary arrangement. The Bank advanced integrated FRM approaches well before other international bodies and national agencies and thus features as a world leader in this respect. We also find that common criticisms of neoliberalism and gender equality against the Bank are not entirely unfounded, but progress has occurred in these directions in recent years.

This paper explores the origins and trajectory of the Washington Consensus - the ideas associated with the developing countries' move to free markets in the 1980s and 1990s. I argue that the Consensus was a transnational policy paradigm, shaped by both scholarly and political forces (Hall, 1993 ). At the core of the Consensus was the international financial institutions' practice of conditionality - making loans to governments in exchange for policy reforms. The Consensus was subsequently weakened by its own unintended consequences, by political forces both within Washington and worldwide and by intellectual changes in the field of economics. However, I argue that the Consensus has yet to encounter any serious rivals.

Does Chinese development assistance undermine recipient country compliance with DAC aid conditionality? I theorize that Chinese aid provides an outside option that weakens recipient countries’ incentives to comply with conditionality by decreasing their dependence on DAC donors and undermining the ability of DAC donors to credibly commit to the enforcement of aid agreements. I test the theoretical predictions using project-level data on government compliance with World Bank project agreements for a sample of 42 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2000-2014. The empirical analysis finds strong support for the hypothesis that Chinese development assistance decreases the likelihood of recipient country compliance with the conditions specified in World Bank project agreements. The results are robust to alternative measures of Chinese development assistance, potential sources of omitted variable bias, and an instrumental variable estimation strategy.