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write one paragraph reading response about Hirschman 1979 and Rostow 1960, around 10 sentences. another paragraph about Goldman 2005, around 5-7 sentences.

THE risE and dEclinE of
dEvEloPmEnT Economics

In 1979 Hirschman was invited to write an essay in honor of
William Arthur Lewis. That same year, Lewis won the Nobel
Prize in economics. Hirschman had sparred with Lewis in
the 1960s: Lewis was a champion of more balanced growth;
Hirschman favored disequilibrium. Lewis’ winning the Nobel
Prize meant— as Clifford Geertz, Hirschman’s long- time
friend, noted— that Hirschman would likely not. By then,
Hirschman was growing more and more concerned that the
field had grown stale. So he used the invitation to take stock
of development economics, to show that it was mixed from
the start. But the combination of a narrowing of the field
(what he called “monoeconomics”) and the insistence on the
part of some (neo- Marxists) that economics in the periphery
somehow earned it a different brand of social science sent the
field off into a desert. In a sleight of hand, Hirschman affili-
ated Lewis with this trend. Now that the great hopes of devel-
opment were largely dashed, the field had rallied around the
opposite of what once motivated it; scholars replaced hope
with futility. What Hirschman advocated was an approach
premised on the idea that peoples of the Third World could
chart their own futures, and did, despite the long- standing
convictions of development economics that only outside
forces and expertise could shake them from their lot.

—Jeremy Adelman

Dev elopm en t

dEvEloPmEnT Economics is a comparatively young area of inquiry. It was born just about a generation ago, as a subdiscipline
of economics, with a number of other social sciences looking on both
skeptically and jealously from a distance. The forties and especially the
fifties saw a remarkable outpouring of fundamental ideas and models
which were to dominate the new field and to generate controversies that
contributed much to its liveliness. In that eminently “exciting” era, de-
velopment economics did much better than the object of its study, the
economic development of the poorer regions of the world, located pri-
marily in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Lately it seems that at least
this particular gap has been narrowing, not so much unfortunately be-
cause of a sudden spurt in economic development, but rather because
the forward movement of our subdiscipline has notably slowed down.
This is of course a subjective judgment. Articles and books are still being
produced. But as an observer and longtime participant I cannot help
feeling that the old liveliness is no longer there, that new ideas are ever
harder to come by and that the field is not adequately reproducing itself.

When scientific activity is specifically directed at solving a pressing
problem, one can immediately think of two reasons why, after a while,
interest in this activity should flag. One is that the problem is in fact
disappearing— either because of the scientific discoveries of the preced-
ing phase or for other reasons. For example, the near demise of interest
in business- cycle theory since the end of World War II was no doubt due
to the remarkably shock- free growth experienced during that period by
the advanced industrial countries, at least up to the mid- seventies. But
this reason cannot possibly be invoked in the present case: The problems
of poverty in the Third World are still very much with us.

The other obvious reason for the decline of scientific interest in a prob-
lem is the opposite experience, that is, the disappointing realization that
a “solution” is by no means at hand and that little if any progress is being
made. Again, this explanation does not sound right in our case, for in
the last thirty years considerable advances have taken place in many erst-
while “underdeveloped” countries— even a balance sheet for the Third
World as a whole is by no means discouraging.1

In sum, the conditions for healthy growth of development economics
would seem to be remarkably favorable: the problem of world poverty is

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

far from solved, but encouraging inroads on the problem have been and
are being made. It is therefore something of a puzzle why development
economics flourished so briefly.

In looking for an explanation, I find it helpful to take a look at the
conditions under which our subdiscipline came into being. It can be
shown, I believe, that this happened as a result of an a priori unlikely
conjunction of distinct ideological currents. The conjunction proved to
be extraordinarily productive, but also created problems for the future.
First of all, because of its heterogeneous ideological makeup, the new sci-
ence was shot through with tensions that would prove disruptive at the
first opportunity. Secondly, because of the circumstances under which
it arose, development economics became overloaded with unreasonable
hopes and ambitions that soon had to be clipped back. Put very briefly
and schematically, this is the tale I shall tell— plus a few stories and re-
flections on the side.

a simple classification of development Theories

The development ideas that were put forward in the forties and fifties
shared two basic ingredients in the area of economics. They also were
based on one unspoken political assumption with which I will deal in the
last section of this paper.

The two basic economic ingredients were what I shall call the re-
jection of the monoeconomics claim and the assertion of the mutual-
benefit claim. By rejection of the monoeconomics claim I mean the
view that underdeveloped countries as a group are set apart, through
a number of specific economic characteristics common to them, from
the advanced industrial countries and that traditional economic analy-
sis, which has concentrated on the industrial countries, must therefore
be recast in significant respects when dealing with underdeveloped
countries. The mutual- benefit claim is the assertion that economic re-
lations between these two groups of countries could be shaped in such
a way as to yield gains for both. The two claims can be either asserted
or rejected, and, as a result, four basic positions exist, as shown in the
following table.

Dev elopm en t

Types of development theories

Monoeconomics claim:
Mutual- benefit claim: Asserted Rejected

Asserted Orthodox economics Development economics
Rejected Marx? Neo- Marxist theories

Even though there are of course positions that do not fit neatly just one
of its cells, this simple table yields a surprisingly comprehensive typology
for the major theories on development of the periphery. In the process, it
makes us realize that there are two unified systems of thought, orthodox
economics and neo- Marxism, and two other less consistent positions that
are therefore likely to be unstable: Marx’s scattered thoughts on develop-
ment of “backward” and colonial areas, on the one hand, and modern de-
velopment economics, on the other. I shall take up these four positions in
turn, but shall give major attention to development economics and to its
evolving relations with and harassment by— the two adjoining positions.

The orthodox position holds to the following two propositions:
(a) economics consists of a number of simple, yet “powerful” theorems
of universal validity: there is only one economics (“just as there is only
one physics”); (b) one of these theorems is that, in a market economy,
benefits flow to all participants, be they individuals or countries, from
all voluntary acts of economic intercourse (“or else they would not en-
gage in those acts”). In this manner, both the monoeconomics and the
mutual- benefit claims are asserted.

The opposite position is that of the major neo- Marxist theories of de-
velopment which hold: (a) exploitation or “unequal exchange” is the es-
sential, permanent feature of the relations between the underdeveloped
“periphery” and the capitalist “center”; (b) as a result of this long process
of exploitation, the political- economic structure of the peripheral coun-
tries is very different from anything ever experienced by the center, and
their development cannot possibly follow the same path— for example, it
has been argued that they cannot have a successful industrialization ex-
perience under capitalist auspices. Here, both the mutual- benefit claim
and the monoeconomics claim are rejected.

A cozy internal consistency, bent on simplifying (and oversimplify-
ing) reality and therefore favorable to ideology formation, is immediately

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

apparent in both the orthodox and the neo- Marxist positions. This is
in contrast with the remaining two positions. It should be clear why I
have placed Marx into the southwesterly cell (mutual- benefit claim re-
jected, monoeconomics claim asserted). Writing in Capital on primitive
accumulation on the one hand, Marx describes the process of spolia-
tion to which the periphery has been subject in the course of the early
development of capitalism in the center. Thus he denies any claim of
mutual benefit from trade between capitalist and “backward” countries.
On the other hand, his well- known statement, “The industrially most
developed country does nothing but hold up to those who follow it on
the industrial ladder, the image of its own future,” coupled with the way
in which he viewed England’s role in India as “objectively” progressive in
opening the way to industrialization by railroad construction, suggests
that he did not perceive the “laws of motion” of countries such as India
as being substantially different from those of the industrially advanced
ones. Marx’s opinions on this latter topic are notoriously complex and
subject to a range of interpretations, as is indicated by the question mark
in the table. But to root neo- Marxist thought firmly in the southeasterly
cell took considerable labors (which involved, among other things, up-
rooting an important component of the thought of Marx). The story of
these labors and revisions has been told elsewhere,2 and my task here
is to deal with the origin and dynamics of the other “hybrid” position:
development economics.

It is easy to see that the conjunction of the two propositions— (a) cer-
tain special features of the economic structure of the underdeveloped
countries make an important portion of orthodox analysis inapplicable
and misleading, and (b) there is a possibility for relations between the
developed and underdeveloped countries to be mutually beneficial and
for the former to contribute to the development of the latter— was es-
sential for our subdiscipline to arise where and when it did: namely, in
the advanced industrial countries of the West, primarily in England and
the United States, at the end of World War II. The first proposition is
required for the creation of a separate theoretical structure, and the sec-
ond was needed if Western economists were to take a strong interest in
the matter— if the likelihood or at least the hope could be held out that
their own countries could play a positive role in the development pro-
cess, perhaps after certain achievable reforms in international economic

Dev elopm en t

relations. In the absence of this perception it would simply not have been
possible to mobilize a large group of activist “problem solvers.”

The inapplicability of orthodox monoeconomics
to Underdeveloped areas

Once a genuinely new current of ideas is firmly established and is being
busily developed by a large group of scholars and researchers, it becomes
almost impossible to appreciate how difficult it was for the new to be
born and to assert itself. Such difficulties are particularly formidable
in economics with its dominant paradigm and analytical tradition— a
well- known source of both strength and weakness for that social science.
Accordingly, there is need for an explanation of the rise and at least tem-
porary success of the heretical, though today familiar, claim that large
portions of the conventional body of economic thought and policy ad-
vice are not applicable to the poorer countries— the more so as much of
this intellectual movement arose in the very “Anglo- Saxon” environment
which had long served as home for the orthodox tradition.

Elements of such an explanation are actually not far to seek. Devel-
opment economics took advantage of the unprecedented discredit or-
thodox economics had fallen into as a result of the depression of the
thirties and of the equally unprecedented success of an attack on or-
thodoxy from within the economics “establishment.” I am talking of
course about the Keynesian Revolution of the thirties, which became the
“new economics” and almost a new orthodoxy in the forties and fifties.
Keynes had firmly established the view that there were two kinds of eco-
nomics: one— the orthodox or classical tradition— which applied, as he
was wont to put it, to the “special case” in which the economy was fully
employed; and a very different system of analytical propositions and of
policy prescriptions (newly worked out by Keynes) that took over when
there was substantial unemployment of human and material resources.3
The Keynesian step from one to two economics was crucial: the ice of
monoeconomics had been broken and the idea that there might be yet
another economics had instant credibility— particularly among the then
highly influential group of Keynesian economists, of course.

Among the various observations that were central to the new devel-
opment economics and implicitly or explicitly made the case for treating

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

the underdeveloped countries as a sui generis group of economies, two
major ones stand out, that relating to rural underemployment and that
stressing the late- coming syndrome in relation to industrialization.

1. Rural underemployment. The early writers on our subject may have
looked for an even closer and more specific connection with the Keynes-
ian system than was provided by the general proposition that different
kinds of economies require different kinds of economics. Such a con-
nection was achieved by the unanimous stress of the pioneering con-
tributions— by Kurt Mandelbaum, Paul Rosenstein- Rodan and Ragnar
Nurkse— on underemployment as a crucial characteristic of underdevel-
opment. The focus on rural underemployment was sufficiently similar to
the Keynesian concern with unemployment to give the pioneers a highly
prized sensation of affinity with the Keynesian system, yet it was also
different enough to generate expectations of eventual independent de-
velopment for our fledgling branch of economic knowledge.

The affinities were actually quite impressive. As is well known, the
Keynesian system took unemployment far more seriously than had been
done by traditional economics and had elaborated a theory of macro-
economic equilibrium with unemployment. Similarly, the early develop-
ment economists wrote at length about the “vicious circle of poverty”— a
state of low- level equilibrium— which can prevail under conditions of
widespread rural underemployment. Moreover, the equilibrium charac-
teristics of an advanced economy with urban unemployment and those
of an underdeveloped economy with rural underemployment were both
held to justify interventionist public policies hitherto strictly proscribed
by orthodox economics. The Keynesians stressed the task of expansion-
ary fiscal policy in combating unemployment. The early development
economists went farther and advocated some form of public investment
planning that would mobilize the underemployed for the purpose of in-
dustrialization, in accordance with a pattern of “balanced growth.”

In these various ways, then, the claim of development economics to
stand as a separate body of economic analysis and policy derived intel-
lectual legitimacy and nurture from the prior success and parallel fea-
tures of the Keynesian Revolution.

The focus on rural underemployment as the principal characteristic
of underdevelopment found its fullest expression in the work of Arthur
Lewis. In his powerful article “Economic Development with Unlimited
Supplies of Labour” he managed— almost miraculously— to squeeze out

Dev elopm en t

of the simple proposition about underemployment a full set of “laws of
motion” for the typical underdeveloped country, as well as a wide range
of recommendations for domestic and international economic policy.

With the concept of rural underemployment serving as the crucial
theoretical underpinning of the separateness of development economics,
it is not surprising that it should have been chosen as a privileged target
by the defenders of orthodoxy and monoeconomics.4 For example, The-
odore W. Schultz devoted a full chapter of his well- known book Trans-
forming Traditional Agriculture (yale, 1964) to an attempt at refuting
what he called “The Doctrine of Agricultural Labor of Zero value.”5 This
suggests an interesting point about the scientific status of economics, and
of social science in general. Whereas in the natural or medical sciences
Nobel prizes are often shared by two persons who have collaborated in,
or deserve joint credit for, a given scientific advance, in economics the
prize is often split between one person who has developed a certain the-
sis and another who has labored mightily to prove it wrong.

At the outset of his celebrated article, Lewis had differentiated the
underdeveloped economy from Keynesian economics by pointing out
that in the Keynesian system there is underemployment of labor as well
as of other factors of production, whereas in an underdevelopment sit-
uation only labor is redundant. In this respect, my own work can be
viewed as an attempt to generalize the diagnosis of underemployment
as the characteristic feature of underdevelopment. Underdeveloped
countries did have hidden reserves, so I asserted, not only of labor, but
of savings, entrepreneurship, and other resources. But to activate them,
Keynesian remedies would be inadequate. What was needed were “pac-
ing devices” and “pressure mechanisms”; whence my strategy of unbal-
anced growth.

My generalization of the underemployment argument may have
somewhat undermined the claim of development economics to auton-
omy and separateness. As the work of Herbert Simon on “satisficing”
and that of Harvey Leibenstein on “X- efficiency” were to show, the per-
formance of the advanced economies also “depends not so much on
finding optimal combinations for given resources as on calling forth and
enlisting . . . resources and abilities that are hidden, scattered, or badly
utilized”— that was the way I had put it in The Strategy of Economic De-
velopment for the less developed countries.6 A feature I had presented as
being specific to the situation of one group of economies was later found

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

to prevail in others as well. Whereas such a finding makes for reunifica-
tion of our science, what we have here is not a return of the prodigal son
to an unchanging, ever- right and – righteous father. Rather, our under-
standing of the economic structures of the West will have been modified
and enriched by the foray into other economies.

This kind of dialectical movement— first comes, upon looking at
outside groups, the astonished finding of Otherness, and then follows
the even more startling discovery that our own group is not all that
different— has of course been characteristic of anthropological studies
of “primitive” societies from their beginning and has in fact been one
of their main attractions. In the field of development economics, some-
thing of this sort has also happened to the ideas put forward by Arthur
Lewis. The dynamics of development with “unlimited” supplies of labor,
which was supposed to be typical of less developed countries, have in
fact prevailed in many “Northern” economies during the postwar period
of rapid growth, owing in large part to massive immigration, temporary
or permanent, spontaneous or organized, from the “South.”7 One of the
more interesting analytical responses to this situation has been the dual
labor market theory of Michael Piore and others. This theory is easily
linked up with the Lewis model, even though that connection has not
been made explicit as far as I know.

2. Late industrialization. I have suggested in the preceding pages that
the concept of underemployment achieved its position as foundation
stone for development economics because of its affinity to the Keynesian
system and because of the desire of the early writers on our subject to
place themselves, as it were, under the protection of a heterodoxy that had
just recently achieved success. There was, moreover, something arcane
about the concept, often also referred to as “disguised unemployment,”
that served to enhance the scientific aura and status of the new field.

Along with the mysteries, however, the common sense of development
also suggested that some rethinking of traditional notions was required.
It became clear during the depression of the thirties and even more
during World War II that industrialization was going to hold an im-
portant place in any active development policy of many under developed
countries. These countries had long specialized— or had been made to
specialize— in the production of staples for export to the advanced in-
dustrial countries which had supplied them in return with modern man-
ufactures. To build up an industrial structure under these “late- coming”

Dev elopm en t

conditions was obviously a formidable task that led to the questioning of
received doctrine according to which the industrial ventures appropriate
to any country would be promptly acted upon by perceptive entrepre-
neurs and would attract the required finance as a result of the smooth
working of capital markets. The long delay in industrialization, the lack
of entrepreneurship for larger ventures, and the real or alleged pres-
ence of a host of other inhibiting factors made for the conviction that,
in underdeveloped areas, industrialization required a deliberate, inten-
sive, guided effort. Naming and characterizing this effort led to a com-
petition of metaphors: big push (Paul Rosenstein- Rodan), takeoff (Walt
W. Rostow), great spurt (Alexander Gerschenkron), minimum critical
effort (Harvey Leibenstein), backward and forward linkages (Albert O.
Hirschman). The discussion around these concepts drew on both theo-
retical arguments— new rationales were developed for protection, plan-
ning, and industrialization itself— and on the experience of European
industrialization in the nineteenth century.

In the latter respect, the struggle between advocates and adversar-
ies of monoeconomics was echoed in the debate between Rostow and
Gerschenkron. Even though Rostow had coined what became the most
popular metaphor (the “takeoff ”), he had really taken a monoeconomics
position. For he divided the development process into his famous five
“stages” with identical content for all countries, no matter when they
started out on the road to industrialization. Gerschenkron derided the
notion “that the process of industrialization repeated itself from coun-
try to country lumbering through [Rostow’s] pentametric rhythm”8 and
showed, to the contrary, how the industrialization of the late- coming Eu-
ropean countries such as Germany and Russia differed in fundamental
respects from the English industrial revolution, largely because of the
intensity of the “catching- up” effort on the part of the latecomers. Even
though it was limited to nineteenth- century Europe, Gerschenkron’s
work was of great importance for development economics by providing
historical support for the case against monoeconomics. As industrializa-
tion actually proceeded in the periphery, it appeared that Third World
industrialization around mid- twentieth century exhibited features rather
different from those Gerschenkron had identified as characteristic for
the European latecomers.9 But for the historically oriented, Gerschenk-
ron’s work supplied the same kind of reassurance Keynesianism had
given to the analytically minded: he showed once and for all that there

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

can be more than one path to development, that countries setting out to
become industrialized are likely to forge their own policies, sequences,
and ideologies to that end.

Subsequent observations strengthened the conviction that industri-
alization in the less developed areas required novel approaches. For ex-
ample, modern, capital- intensive industry was found to be less effective
in absorbing the “unlimited supplies of labor” available in agriculture
than had been the case in the course of earlier experiences of industrial-
ization. Advances in industrialization were frequently accompanied by
persistent inflationary and balance- of- payment pressures which raised
questions about the adequacy of traditional remedies and led, in Latin
America, to the “sociological” and “structuralist” theses on inflation,
which, interestingly, have now gained some currency in the advanced
countries, usually without due credit being given.10 Also, the vigorous
development of the transnational corporation in the postwar period
raised entirely new “political economy” questions about the extent to
which a country should attract, restrict, or control these purveyors of
modern technology and products.

The mutual- benefit assumption

The new (far from unified) body of doctrine and policy advice that was
built up in this manner was closely connected, as noted earlier, with the
proposition that the core industrial countries could make an important,
even an essential, contribution to the development effort of the periph-
ery through expanded trade, financial transfers, and technical assistance.

The need for large injections of financial aid fitted particularly well into
those theories advocating a “big push.” It was argued that such an effort
could only be mounted with substantial help from the advanced coun-
tries, as the poor countries were unable to generate the needed savings
from within. Here the underlying model was the new growth econom-
ics, which, in its simplest (Harrod- Domar) version, showed a country’s
growth rate to be determined by the propensity to save and the capital-
output ratio. Growth economics had evolved independently from devel-
opment economics, as a direct offshoot of the Keynesian system and its
macroeconomic concepts. While devised primarily with the advanced
industrial countries in mind, it found an early practical application in

Dev elopm en t

the planning exercises for developing countries that became common
in the fifties. These exercises invariably contained projections for an ex-
pansion of trade and aid. Their underlying assumption was necessarily
that such enlarged economic relations between rich and poor countries
would be beneficial for both. Now this proposition fits nicely into ortho-
dox monoeconomics, but it might have been expected to arouse some
suspicion among development economists and to mix rather poorly with
some of the other elements and assertions of the new subdiscipline. For
example, so it could have been asked, why are the countries of the South
in a state where, according to some, it takes a huge push to get them onto
some growth path? Why are they so impoverished in spite of having long
been drawn into the famous “network of world trade”11 which was sup-
posed to yield mutual benefits for all participants? Is it perhaps because,
in the process, some countries have been caught in the net to be vic-
timized by some imperialist spider? But such indelicate questions were
hardly put in the halcyon days of the immediate postwar years, except
perhaps in muted tones by a few faraway voices, such as Raúl Prebisch’s.
Of that more later.

Action- oriented thought seldom excels in consistency. Development
economics is no exception to this rule; it was born from the marriage
between the new insights about the sui generis economic problems of
the underdeveloped countries and the overwhelming desire to achieve
rapid progress in solving these problems with the instruments at hand,
or thought to be within reach, such as large- scale foreign aid. A factor
in “arranging” this marriage, in spite of the incompatibilities involved,
was the success of the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. Here the task of
postwar reconstruction was mastered with remarkable speed, thanks, so
it appeared at least, to a combination of foreign aid with some economic
planning and cooperation on the part of the aid recipients. It has often
been pointed out that this European success story led to numerous fail-
ures in the Third World, that it lamentably blocked a realistic assessment
of the task of development, in comparison with that of reconstruction.

But the matter can be seen in a different light. True, the success of
the Marshall Plan deceived economists, policymakers, and enlightened
opinion in the West into believing that infusion of capital helped along by
the right kind of investment planning might be able to grind out growth
and welfare all over the globe. But— and here is an application of what I
have called the “Principle of the Hiding Hand”— on balance it may have

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

been a good thing that we let ourselves be so deceived. Had the tough-
ness of the development problem and the difficulties in the North- South
relationship been correctly sized up from the outset, the considerable
intellectual and political mobilization for the enterprise would surely not
have occurred. In that case, and in spite of the various “development di-
sasters” which we have experienced (and which will be discussed later in
this essay), would we not be even farther away from an acceptable world
than we are today?

In sum, one historical function of the rise of development economics
was to inspire confidence in the manageability of the development enter-
prise and thereby to help place it on the agenda of policymakers the world
over. The assertion of the mutual- benefit claim served this purpose.

The strange alliance of neo- marxism and
monoeconomics against development Economics

Predictably, when the path to development turned out to be far less
smooth than had been thought, the hybrid nature of the new subdis-
cipline resulted in its being subjected to two kinds of attacks. The
neoclassical Right faulted it for having forsaken the true principles of
monoeconomics and for having compounded, through its newfangled
policy recommendations, the problem it set out to solve. For the neo-
Marxists, on the other hand, development economics had not gone far
enough in its analysis of the predicament of the poor countries: so seri-
ous was their problem pronounced to be that nothing but total change in
their socioeconomic structure and in their relations to the rich countries
could make a difference; pending such change, so- called development
policies only created new forms of exploitation and “dependency.” The
two fundamentalist critiques attacked development economics from op-
posite directions and in totally different terms: but they could converge
in their specific indictments— as they indeed did, particularly in the im-
portant arena of industrialization. Because the adherents of neoclassical
economics and those of various neo- Marxist schools of thought live in
quite separate worlds, they were not even aware of acting in unison. In
general, that strange de facto alliance has hardly been noted; but it plays
an important role in the evolution of thinking on development and its
story must be briefly told.

Dev elopm en t

Doubts about the harmony of interests between the developed and
underdeveloped countries arose at an early stage among some of the
major contributors to the new subdiscipline. There was widespread ac-
ceptance of the view that the advanced industrial countries could hence-
forth contribute to the development of the less advanced, particularly
through financial assistance, but questions were raised in various quar-
ters about the equitable distribution of the gains from trade, both in the
past and currently. In 1949, Raúl Prebisch and Hans Singer formulated
(simultaneously and independently) their famous “thesis” on the secu-
lar tendency of the terms of trade to turn against countries exporting
primary products and importing manufactures.12 They attributed this
alleged tendency to the power of trade unions in the advanced countries
and to conditions of underemployment in the periphery. The argument
was put forward to justify a sustained policy of industrialization. Arthur
Lewis was led by his model in a rather similar direction: as long as “un-
limited supplies of labor” in the subsistence sector depress the real wage
throughout the economy, any gains from productivity increases in the
export sector are likely to accrue to the importing countries; moreover,
in a situation in which there is surplus labor at the ruling wage, prices
give the wrong signals for resource allocation in general and for the in-
ternational division of labor in particular; the result was a further argu-
ment for protection and industrialization.

Both the Prebisch- Singer and the Lewis arguments showed that with-
out a judiciously interventionist state in the periphery, the cards were in-
evitably stacked in favor of the center. On the whole, it looked as though
this was the result of some unkind fate rather than of deliberate maneu-
vers on the center’s part. Critics from the Left later took Arthur Lewis to
task for viewing unlimited supplies of labor as a datum, rather than as
something that is systematically produced by the colonizers and capital-
ists.13 Lewis was of course fully aware of such situations and specifically
notes at one point that in Africa the imperial powers impoverished the
subsistence economy “by taking away the people’s land, or by demand-
ing forced labour in the capitalist sector, or by imposing taxes to drive
people to work for capitalist employers.”14 For Lewis these practices were
simply not a crucial characteristic of the model— after all, a decline in
infant mortality could have the same effect in augmenting labor supply
as a head tax.

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

It appears nevertheless that the debate among development econo-
mists in the fifties included the canvassing of some antagonistic aspects
of the center- periphery relation. The theories just noted attempted to
show that the gain from trade might be unequally distributed (perhaps
even to the point where one group of countries would not gain at all) but
did not go so far as to claim that the relationship between two groups of
countries could actually be exploitative in the sense that trade and other
forms of economic intercourse would enrich one group at the expense
of another— an assertion that would be unthinkable within the assump-
tions of the classical theory of international trade. yet, even this kind
of assertion was made at a relatively early stage of the debate. Gunnar
Myrdal invoked the principle of cumulative causation (which he had first
developed in his American Dilemma) in seeking to understand the rea-
son for persistent and increasing income disparities within countries; but
the notion was easily extended to contacts between countries. Myrdal’s
argument on the possibility of further impoverishment of the poor re-
gion (or country) was largely based on the likelihood of its losing skilled
people and other scarce factors, and also on the possible destruction of
its handicrafts and industries. Independently of Myrdal, I had developed
similar ideas: Myrdal’s “backwash effect”— the factors making for in-
creasing disparity— became “polarization effect” under my pen, whereas
his “spread effect”— the factors making for the spread of prosperity from
the rich to the poor regions— was named by me “trickling down effect.”
(Optimal terminology is probably achieved by combining Myrdal’s
“spread” with my “polarization” effects.) We both argued, though with
different emphases, that the possibility of the polarization effect being
stronger than the spread effect must be taken seriously, and thus went
counter not only to the theory of international trade, but to the broader
traditional belief, so eloquently expressed by John Stuart Mill,15 that con-
tact between dissimilar groups is always a source of all- around progress.
Anyone who had observed the development scene with some care could
not but have serious doubts about this view: in Latin America, for exam-
ple, industrial progress was particularly vigorous during the World Wars
and the Great Depression when contacts with the industrial countries
were at a low ebb. To me, this meant no more than that periods of isola-
tion may be beneficial and I saw some alternation of contact and isola-
tion as creating optimal conditions for industrial development.16 In any

Dev elopm en t

event, both Myrdal and I looked at the polarization effects as forces that
can be opposed and neutralized by public policies; and I tried to show
that instead of invoking such policies as a deus ex machina (as I thought
Myrdal did), it is possible to see them as arising out of, and in reaction
to, the experience of polarization.

A strange thing happened once it had been pointed out that interac-
tion between the rich and poor countries could in certain circumstances
be in the nature of an antagonistic, zero- sum game: very soon it proved
intellectually and politically attractive to assert that such was the essence
of the relationship and that it held as an iron law through all phases of
contacts between the capitalist center and the periphery. Just as earlier
those brought up in the classical tradition of Smith and Ricardo were un-
able to conceive of a gain from trade that is not mutual, so did it become
impossible for the new polarization enthusiasts to perceive anything but
pauperization and degradation in each of the successive phases of the pe-
riphery’s history.17 This is the “development of underdevelopment” thesis,
put forward by André Gunder Frank, and also espoused by some of the
more extreme holders of the “dependency” doctrine. Given the historical
moment at which these views arose, their first and primary assignment
was to mercilessly castigate what had up to then been widely believed
to hold the promise of economic emancipation for the underdeveloped
countries: industrialization. We are now in the mid- sixties, at which time
real difficulties and growing pains were experienced by industry in some
leading Third World countries after a prolonged period of vigorous ex-
pansion. This situation was taken advantage of in order to characterize
all of industrialization as a total failure on a number of (not always con-
sistent) counts: it was “exhausted,” “distorted,” lacked integration, led to
domination and exploitation by multinationals in alliance with a domestic
“lumpen bourgeoisie,” was excessively capital- intensive and therefore sab-
otaged employment, and fostered a more unequal distribution of income
along with a new, more insidious, kind of dependency than ever before.

At just about the same time, the neoclassical economists or mono-
economists— as they should be called in accordance with the terminol-
ogy of this essay— were sharpening their own knives for an assault on
development policies that had pushed industrialization for the domestic
market. In contrast to the multiple indictment from the Left, the mono-
economists concentrated on a single, simple, but to them capital, flaw
of these policies: misallocation of resources. By itself this critique was

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

highly predictable and might not have carried more weight than warn-
ings against industrialization emanating from essentially the same camp
ten, or twenty, or fifty years earlier. But the effectiveness of the critique
was now greater for various reasons. First of all, as a result of the neo-
Marxist writings just noted, some of the early advocates of industrial-
ization had now themselves become its sharpest critics. Second, specific
policies which in the early stage had been useful in promoting industrial-
ization, though at the cost of inflationary and balance- of- payments pres-
sures, did run into decreasing returns in the sixties: they achieved less
industrialization at the cost of greater inflation and balance- of- payments
problems than before. Third, the practice of deliberate industrialization
had given rise to exaggeration and abuse in a number of countries, and
it became easy to draw up a list of horrible examples that served to in-
criminate the whole effort. Fourth, a new set of policies emphasizing
exports of manufactures from developing countries became attractive,
because of the then rapid expansion of world trade, and the possibilities
of success of such policies was demonstrated by countries like Taiwan
and South Korea. Under these conditions, the neoclassical strictures be-
came more persuasive than they had been for a long time.

The target of the complementary neo- Marxist and neoclassical writ-
ings was not just the new industrial establishment, which in fact survived
the onslaught rather well; on the ideological plane, the intended victim
was the new development economics, which had strongly advocated in-
dustrial development and was now charged with intellectual responsi-
bility for whatever had gone wrong. The blows from Left and Right that
fell upon the fledgling and far from unified subdiscipline left it, indeed,
rather stunned: so much so that the most intrepid defense of what had
been accomplished by the postwar industrialization efforts in the Third
World came not from the old stalwarts, but from an English socialist in
the tradition of Marx’s original position on the problem of backward
areas, the late Bill Warren.18

The real Wounding of development Economics

It would of course be silly— just as silly as the German proverb Viel Feind,
viel Ehr (many enemies, much honor)— to hold that any doctrine or pol-
icy that is attacked simultaneously from both Left and Right is, for that

Dev elopm en t

very reason, supremely invested with truth and wisdom. I have already
noted that the neoclassical critics made some valid points, just as the
neo- Marxists raised a number of serious issues, particularly in the areas
of excessive foreign control and of unequal income distribution. But
normally such criticisms should have led to some reformulations and
eventually to a strengthening of the structure of development econom-
ics. In fact, however, this was not to be the case. No new synthesis ap-
peared. Several explanations can be offered. For one thing, development
economics had been built up on the basis of a construct, the “typical
underdeveloped country,” which became increasingly unreal as develop-
ment proceeded at very different rates and took very different shapes in
the various countries of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Lenin’s law of
uneven development, originally formulated with the major imperialist
powers in mind, caught up with the Third World! It became clear, for
example, that, for the purpose of the most elementary propositions of
development strategy, countries with large populations differ substan-
tially from the ever more numerous ministates of the Third World,19 just
as there turned out to be few problems in common between petroleum
exporters and petroleum- importing developing countries. The concept
of a unified body of analysis and policy recommendations for all under-
developed countries, which contributed a great deal to the rise of the
subdiscipline, became in a sense a victim of the very success of develop-
ment and of its unevenness.

But there was a more weighty reason for the failure of development
economics to recover decisively from the attacks it had been subjected
to by its critics. It lies in the series of political disasters that struck a
number of Third World countries from the sixties on, disasters that were
clearly somehow connected with the stresses and strains accompany-
ing development and “modernization.”20 These development disasters,
ranging from civil wars to the establishment of murderous authoritar-
ian regimes, could not but give pause to a group of social scientists,
who, after all, had taken up the cultivation of development economics
in the wake of World War II not as narrow specialists, but impelled by
the vision of a better world. As liberals, most of them presumed that “all
good things go together”21 and took it for granted that if only a good
job could be done in raising the national income of the countries con-
cerned, a number of beneficial effects would follow in the social, politi-
cal, and cultural realms.

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

When it turned out instead that the promotion of economic growth
entailed not infrequently a sequence of events involving serious retro-
gression in those other areas, including the wholesale loss of civil and
human rights, the easy self- confidence that our subdiscipline exuded
in its early stages was impaired. What looked like a failure to mount a
vigorous counterattack against the unholy alliance of neo- Marxists and
neoclassicists may well have been rooted in increasing self- doubt, based
on mishaps far more serious than either the “misallocation of resources”
of the neoclassicists or the “new dependency” of the neo- Marxists.

Not that all the large and gifted group of development economists
which had in the meantime been recruited into the new branch of knowl-
edge turned suddenly silent. Some retreated from the position “all good
things go together” to “good economics is good for people.”22 In other
words, rather than assuming that economic development would bring
progress in other fields, they thought it legitimate to operate on the basis
of an implicit Pareto- optimality assumption: like plumbing repairs or im-
provements in traffic control, the technical efforts of economists would
improve matters in one area while at worst leaving others unchanged,
thus making society as a whole better off. Economic development policy
was here in effect downgraded to a technical task exclusively involved
with efficiency improvements. An illusion was created and sought that, by
confining itself to smaller- scale, highly technical problems, development
economics could carry on regardless of political cataclysms.

There was, however, another reaction that was to have a considerable
impact. Experiencing a double frustration, one over the appalling po-
litical events as such, and the other over their inability to comprehend
them, a number of analysts and practitioners of economic development
were moved to look at the economic performance itself with a more
critical eye than before. In a Freudian act of displacement, they “took
out” their distress over the political side on the weaker aspects of the
economic record. Within countries with authoritarian regimes, the dis-
placement was often reinforced, unintentionally of course, by the official
censorship that was much more rigorous with regard to political dissent
than in matters of economic performance.

It was, in a sense, an application of the maxim “all good things go
together” in reverse. Now that political developments had taken a re-
soundingly wrong turn, one had to prove that the economic story was
similarly unattractive. Some economists were satisfied once the balance

Dev elopm en t

between political and economic performance had been restored in this
fashion, be it at a wretchedly low level. But others were in a more activist
mood. Impotent in the face of political injustice and tyranny, yet feel-
ing a faint sense of responsibility, they were attempting to make amends
by exposing economic injustice. In doing so, they paid little attention to
John Rawls who argued, at just about that time, in A Theory of Justice
that “a departure from the institutions of equal liberty . . . cannot be jus-
tified by or compensated for by greater social or economic advantage.”23
But perhaps it was fortunate— and a measure of the vitality of the de-
velopment movement— that the disappointment over politics led to an
attempt at righting at least those wrongs economists could denounce in
their professional capacity.

Here then is one important origin of the concern with income distri-
bution which became a dominant theme in the development literature
in the early seventies. Albert Fishlow’s finding, on the basis of the 1970
census, that income distribution in Brazil had become more unequal and
that some low- income groups may even have come to be worse off in
absolute terms, in spite of (because of?) impressive growth, was partic-
ularly influential.24 An alarm based on this and similar data from other
countries was sounded by Robert McNamara, the President of the World
Bank, in his annual address to the Board of Governors meeting in 1972.
A large number of studies followed, and an attempt was made to under-
stand how development could be shaped in accordance with distribu-
tional goals, or to formulate policies that would combine the objectives
of growth and distribution.

Before long, attention was directed not only to the relative aspects
of income distribution, but to the absolute level of need satisfaction
among the poorer groups of a country’s population. Thus was born the
concern with basic needs— of food, health, education, etc.— that is cur-
rently a principal preoccupation of development economics. Just as the
construct of the “typical underdeveloped country” gave way to diverse
categories of countries, each with characteristics of its own, so did the
heretofore unique maximand of development economics (income per
capita) dissolve into a variety of partial objectives, each requiring consul-
tation with different experts— on nutrition, public health, housing, and
education, among others.

There is of course much to be said for this new concreteness in de-
velopment studies, and particularly for the concern with the poorer

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

sections. Nevertheless, development economics started out as the spear-
head of an effort that was to bring all- around emancipation from back-
wardness. If that effort is to fulfill its promise, the challenge posed by
dismal politics must be met rather than avoided or evaded. By now it
has become quite clear that this cannot be done by economics alone.
It is for this reason that the decline of development economics cannot
be fully reversed: our subdiscipline had achieved its considerable luster
and excitement through the implicit idea that it could slay the dragon of
backwardness virtually by itself or, at least, that its contribution to this
task was central. We now know that this is not so; a consoling thought
is that we may have gained in maturity what we have lost in excitement.

Looking backward, the whole episode seems curious. How could a
group of social scientists that had just lived through the most calamitous
“derailments of history” in various major economically advanced coun-
tries entertain such great hopes for economic development per se? Here
I can perhaps offer some enlightenment by drawing on my recent work
in the history of ideas. In The Passions and the Interests I showed that the
rise of commerce and money- making activities in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was then looked upon as promising for political sta-
bility and progress; and I stressed that such optimistic expectations were
not based on a new respect for these activities, but rather on continuing
contempt for them: unlike the passionate, aristocratic pursuit of glory
and power with its then well- recognized potential for disaster, the love
of money was believed to be “incapable of causing either good or evil on
a grand scale.”25 A similar perception may have been at work in relation
to the less developed countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America of
the twentieth century. The Western economists who looked at them at
the end of World War II were convinced that these countries were not
all that complicated: their major problems would be solved if only their
national income per capita could be raised adequately. At an earlier time,
contempt for the countries designated as “rude and barbarous” in the
eighteenth century, as “backward” in the nineteenth and as “underdevel-
oped” in the twentieth had taken the form of relegating them to perma-
nent lowly status, in terms of economic and other prospects, on account
of unchangeable factors such as hostile climate, poor resources, or infe-
rior race. With the new doctrine of economic growth, contempt took a
more sophisticated form: suddenly it was taken for granted that progress
of these countries would be smoothly linear if only they adopted the

Dev elopm en t

right kind of integrated development program! Given what was seen as
their overwhelming problem of poverty, the underdeveloped countries
were expected to perform like wind- up toys and to “lumber through”
the various stages of development single- mindedly; their reactions to
change were not to be nearly as traumatic or aberrant as those of the
Europeans, with their feudal residues, psychological complexes and ex-
quisite high culture. In sum, like the “innocent” and doux trader of the
eighteenth century, these countries were perceived to have only interests
and no passions.

Once again, we have learned otherwise.

notes

This retrospective essay, which is also to appear in the forthcoming collection
in honor of Sir Arthur Lewis (London: George Allen and Unwin), is of course
a highly selective review. In particular, it does not treat the development of our
factual knowledge about the development process which has often included the
testing of theories; here the main debt is owed to such figures as Simon Kuznets
and Hollis Chenery. A number of other surveys of the sort here attempted
have appeared recently. See, in particular, Paul Streeten, “Development ideas
in historical perspective,” in Toward a New Strategy for Development, Rothko
Chapel Colloquium (New york: Pergamon Press, 1979), pp. 21– 52, and
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, “The originality of a copy: CEPAL and the idea
of development,” CEPAL Review (second half of 1977), UN Commission for
Latin America, UN Publication E.77.II.G.5, pp. 7– 40. See also the introductory
section of Chapter 4 for a brief review of “theorizing on economic development
in historical perspective” with a rather different focus.

1. See, for example, David Morawetz, Twenty- Free Years of Economic Develop-
ment: 1950 to 1975 (Washington, D.C : World Bank, 1977).

2. B. Sutcliffe, “Imperialism and Industrialization in the Third World,” in
R. Owen and B. Sutcliffe, eds., Studies in the Theory of Imperialism (London:
Longman, 1972), pp. 180– 86, and P. Singer, “Multinacionais: internacional-
ização e crise,” Caderno CEBRAP No. 28 (São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense, 1977),
pp. 50– 56. On the complexity of Marx’s views, even in the preface of Capital
where the cited phrase appears, see “A Generalized Linkage Approach to Devel-
opment, with Special Reference to Staples,” Essays in Trespassing: Economics to
Politics and Beyond (New york: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 89– 90.

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

3. Dudley Seers leaned on this established terminological usage with his
article “The Limitations of the Special Case,” Bulletin of the Oxford University
Institute of Economics and Statistics, 25 (May 1963): 77– 98, in which he pleaded
for recasting the teaching of economics so as to make it more useful in dealing
with the problems of the less- developed countries. The “special case” that had
falsely claimed generality was, for Keynes, the fully employed economy; for
Seers, it was the economy of the advanced capitalist countries, in contrast to
conditions of underdevelopment.

4. See, for example, Jacob viner, “Some Reflections on the Concept of
‘Disguised Unemployment,’ ” in Contribuiçōes à Análise do Desenvolvimiento
Econômico (Essays in honor of Eugênio Gudin), (Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1957),
pp. 345– 54.

5. His principal empirical argument was the actual decline in agricultural
output suffered when the labor force suddenly diminished in a country with an
allegedly redundant labor force in agriculture, as happened during the 1918– 19
influenza epidemic in India. Arthur Lewis pointed out later that the conse-
quences he had drawn from the assumption of zero marginal productivity in
agriculture would remain fully in force provided only the supply of labor at the
given wage in industry exceeds the demand, a condition that is much weaker
than that of zero marginal productivity. See W. Arthur Lewis, “Reflections on
Unlimited Labor,” in International Economics and Development: Essays in Honor
of Raúl Prebisch (New york and London: Academic Press, 1972), pp. 75– 96.

6. New Haven: yale University Press, 1958, p. 5.
7. C. P. Kindleberger, Europe’s Postwar Growth: The Role of Labor Supply

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967).
8. Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

vard University Press, 1962), p. 355.
9. A. O. Hirschman, “The Political Economy of Import- Substituting Indus-

trialization in Latin America,” published in 1968 and reprinted in Hirschman,
A Bias for Hope: Essays on Development and Latin America (New Haven: yale
University Press, 1971), Chapter 3.

10. See “The Social and Political Matrix of Inflation: Elaborations on the Latin
American Experience,” Essays in Trespassing, pp. 177– 208.

11. This was the title of a well- known League of Nations study stressing the
benefits of multilateral trade which were being threatened in the thirties by the
spread of bilateralism and exchange controls. Its principal author was Folke
Hilgerdt, a Swedish economist. In the immediate postwar period, Hilgerdt,
then with the United Nations, noted that trade, however beneficial, had not

Dev elopm en t

adequately contributed to a narrowing of income differentials between coun-
tries. With Hilgerdt coming from the Heckscher- Ohlin tradition and having
celebrated the contributions of world trade to welfare, this paper, which was
published only in processed form in the proceedings of a congress (I have not
been able to locate it), was influential in raising questions about the benign
effects of international economic relations on the poorer countries.

12. An account of the emergence of the thesis is now available in Joseph Love,
“Raúl Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange,” Latin
American Research Review 15 (November 1980): 45– 72. See also my earlier
essay “Ideologies of Economic Development in Latin America” (1961), reprinted
in A Bias for Hope, Chapter 13. The latest review of the ensuing controversy and
related evidence is in two articles by John Spraos: “The Theory of Deteriorating
Terms of Trade Revisited,” Greek Economic Review 1 (December 1979): 15– 42,
and “The Statistical Debate on the Net Barter Terms of Trade between Primary
Commodities and Manufactures,” Economic Journal 90 (March 1980): 107– 28.

13. G. Arrighi; “Labour Supplies in Historical Perspective: A Study of the Pro-
letarianization of the African Peasantry in Rhodesia,” Journal of Development
Studies 6 (April 1970): 197– 234.

14. W. Arthur Lewis, “Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of
Labour,” published in 1954 and reprinted in A. N. Agarwala and S. P. Singh,
ed.; The Economics of Underdevelopment (London: Oxford University Press,
1958), p. 410.

15. “It is hardly possible to overrate the value, in the present low state of
human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons
dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those
with which they are familiar. . . . Such communication has always been, and is
peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.” J. S. Mill,
Principles of Political Economy, Book III, Chapter 17, para. 5.

16. Strategy, pp. 173– 5, 199– 201.
17. This view has been aptly labeled “catastrofismo” by Anibal Pinto.
18. B. Warren, “Imperialism and Capitalist Accumulation,” New Left Review,

no. 81 (Sept.– Oct. 1973): 3– 45, and “The postwar economic experience of the
Third World,” in Toward a New Strategy for Development, pp. 144– 68.

19. This is stressed, for example, by Clive y. Thomas, Dependence and Trans-
formation: The Economics of the Transition to Socialism (New york: Monthly
Review Press, 1974), passim.

20. On this subject, see also “The Changing Tolerance for Income Inequality
in the Course of Economic Development” and “The Turn to Authoritarianism

r i s e & decl i n e of dev elopm en t econom ic s

in Latin America and the Search for its Economic Determinants,” Essays in
Trespassing, pp. 39– 58 and 98– 133.

21. See Robert Packenham, Liberal America and the Third World (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973), pp. 123– 9.

22. An expression attributed to Arnold Harberger, in an article in the New
York Times of February 7, 1980.

23. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 61.
24. “Brazilian Size Distribution of Income,” American Economic Review 62

(May 1972): 391– 402.
25. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 58.

II
TheRise of the Bank

The New World had to be yoked, and kept yoked, to the Old

World, if the latter were to enjoy durable peace and prosperity.

—John Maynard Keynes, , personal correspondence

(Skidelsky )

s World Bank/IMF officials gathered in Washington,
D.C., for the  annual meetings in the face of an

ailing global economy the mood was anything but
grim. The meetings marked the fifty-first anniver-

sary of the Bretton Woods conference, which led to the estab-
lishment of these institutions and the Bank’s stewardship of
the global development project. But the party had its gate-
crashers—an energetic global activist network that stormed
downtown Washington with an impressive “ Years Is Enough”
campaign. The protesters successfully undermined the anniver-

sary celebration and shocked the complacent Bank and IMF
leadership. Over time they have played a major role in the re-
forming of the World Bank and giving shape to its next devel-
opment regime. Inside and outside this oppositional cam-
paign, a broad range of observers identified Bank policies as
the catalyst for the collapse of economies throughout Latin
America, Africa, and Asia, and for the two “lost decades” dur-
ing which whole regions of the world suffered from substan-
tial backsliding in per capita income, GDP, and health and so-
cial indicators. Representatives of the displaced, aggrieved, and
angry stakeholders of Bank/IMF projects had crossed oceans
to come speak out at street protests, teach-ins, and workshops
scattered throughout the city. From their perspective, we should
have all been wearing black. Few officials and delegates at the
Bank/IMF annual meetings, however, seemed to agree.

The majority of those attending the annual meetings
were not members of the development community one learns
about in development studies courses or through the media.
They were not associated with church-based charities or food
aid NGOs. None spoke the language of charity or of desper-
ately poor third worlders. There was no discourse of resuscita-
tion or emergency aid to avert catastrophe. In fact, they spoke
only of business. Packing Washington during the week of the
Bank/IMF meetings were the world’s central bankers and fi-
nance ministers, and they were obviously on a shopping spree.
At one hotel, they met with Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, and the
CEOs of Westinghouse, Bechtel, Citicorp, and major banking,
insurance, finance, defense and armaments, telecommunica-
tions, energy and power, and computer companies. At the main
hotel, they had breakfast courtesy of Bear Stearns, Baring Se-
curities International, the Istanbul Stock Exchange, ING Cap-
ital, Banco Portugal, and Standard Chartered Bank. Lunch was

The Rise of the Bank 

hosted by Chemical Bank, Creditanstalt-Bankverein, and ABN-
AMRO in the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the National Mu-
seum of Women in the Arts. In the late afternoon, the official
program brought all delegates and guests back to the Sheraton
Hotel to listen to the Bank president and IMF managing di-
rector officially convene the annual meetings. But by  p.m.,
the early round of cocktail receptions commenced, courtesy of
the Bank of Tokyo, Brown Brothers Harriman & Company,
Unico Banking Group, Citicorp/Citibank, Arab Banking Cor-
poration, and Bank of America, among others. First Chicago
Bank hosted a dinner party at the Meridian House, Morgan
Stanley at the Phillips Collection, Chase Manhattan Bank at
the Decatur House, and ChinaTrust Commercial Bank at the
Twin Oaks. An elite group of high rollers attended a black-tie
dinner with J. P. Morgan executives. Later, guests were invited
to after-dinner parties, which included the  p.m. live show,
“Broadway Meets Berlin,” hosted by Bankgesellschaft Berlin.
Delegates looked exhausted after the first day of the meetings,
but there was little to suggest they were anything more than
weary revelers.

Running concurrently for the scientific community was
a conference sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences
(NAS) and World Bank that included Vice President Al Gore;
UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali (by video);
World Bank President James Wolfensohn; Jacques-Yves Cou-
steau; Harvard Professor E. O. Wilson; Worldwatch Institute
President Lester Brown; the director general of World Wildlife
Fund, Claude Martin; Mali Prime Minister Ibrahim Boubacar
Keita; the administrator of China’s National Environmental
Protection Agency, Xie Zhenhua; and CEO and chair of Enron
Corporation, Rebecca Mark. For three days, in panels and ple-
naries, scientists and officials from the World Bank, govern-

 The Rise of the Bank

ments, NGOs, universities, research institutes, and private cor-
porations discussed “Effective Financing of Environmentally
Sustainable Development” at the prestigious National Acad-
emy of Sciences. In his welcome address, the academy’s presi-
dent, Bruce Alberts, announced his gratitude to the World
Bank for helping the academy incorporate the concept of en-
vironmentally sustainable development into its scientific work.
The conference was glamorous and upbeat in ways uncom-
mon to the tweedy world of science and academics.

The business of development is a profitable and inclusive
one, and the topics discussed at these and other World Bank
meetings are not typically hunger or poverty. Whereas most
writings on the World Bank claim that some combination of
the “poor” borrowing states, Northern aid agencies, and devel-
opment NGOs are the main constituents and partners of the
World Bank, my observations of the Bank’s annual meetings
lead me to suggest that the actors in the world of development
are much more diverse, with powerful ties to familiar for-profit
interests. Moreover, there is nothing intrinsic or inevitable
about the specific discourses of development the Bank has pur-
sued or its role in the global political economy during its sixty-
year history. Most authors assume as inevitable the Bank’s rise
to prominence as the world’s premier global institution, and
they take for granted the authority of global institutions in
general. By contrast, in this chapter I will explain the political-
economic contexts and discursive strategies that helped the
Bank to become a globally hegemonic institution by empha-
sizing the historical conjunctures that others have glossed over
—in particular, the phenomenal way that Robert McNamara
inserted the World Bank into the global economy as a power-
ful institutional force. Although historians of the World Bank
note the Bank’s growth under McNamara, they do not exam-

The Rise of the Bank 

ine the key historic shifts in the global political economy and
how the technologies of power/knowledge (Foucault ) es-
tablished under McNamara enabled the Bank to grow and
prosper even during difficult times. These technologies have
become crucial for the Bank as it tries to maintain its reputa-
tion in a world where anti-Bank social movements have gained
considerable legitimacy.

Four distinct periods mark the history of the World Bank:
the “reluctant Banker” period of  – ; the Bank’s “rise to
power” in the period of  –  during which the calls for
“poverty alleviation” and meeting “basic needs” for the “abso-
lute poor” reflected a new rhetorical turn in development; the
“debt and adjustment” period of  – ; and the “green ne-
oliberal” period from  to the present. This first period was
shaped by the absolute control over the Bank by the U.S. Trea-
sury, the State Department, and Wall Street bankers, who were
the Bank’s main constituents during its early years.1 These ac-
tors were primarily interested in having the Bank lend for
bricks-and-mortar types of projects. They kept tight control
over Bank expenditures based on conservative banker ethics,
except when the State Department insisted that providing sup-
port for its cold war allies was more important. Under these
constraints and conflicting rationalities, the Bank remained
small and ineffectual. During its first two decades, the Bank
was unable to articulate a universal project of liberal capitalist
development, and as a consequence, it played a very minor role
in the realms of development and political economy during its
first twenty years.

It was only during the McNamara era (-) that the
World Bank emerged as a powerful organization, spurring the
creation of a new transnational space that the Bank helped fill
with professional networks and discursive regimes of rule,

 The Rise of the Bank

truth, and government. During his thirteen-year reign as World
Bank president, Robert McNamara, a former U.S. secretary of
defense, converted the Bank into a major transnational insti-
tution as well as the world’s foremost authority on develop-
ment. Ironically, the engines of growth for the twin Bretton
Woods institutions fired up only after the longstanding Bret-
ton Woods agreement on currency and capital controls failed.
As no single institution had before, the World Bank under Mc-
Namara facilitated an explosion of financial capital invest-
ment in the global South as well as a surfeit of development
knowledge, which repositioned development as a global proj-
ect. By bringing together the ideas of economic growth, social
upliftment, and global security, and making it into a “science”
backed by World Bank finances, McNamara created a power/
knowledge leviathan of a completely new sort. Not a state, not
an international agency, not a finance bank, the World Bank
became something quite unique in the world—a one-of-a-
kind supranational development institution.

After a decade of growth in the s, the Bank’s capital,
ideas, and institutions set root and flowered in many different
forms around the world: national development banks, na-
tional development institutes, national centers for agricultural
(or green revolution) research, large dams, highways, power
plants, mines, and national forestry projects. A major learning
initiative sparked by the World Bank, United Nations agencies,
and universities in the North fueled studies in development
economics, poverty, and the green revolution. This research
became meaningful when it was supported by Northern foun-
dations, used by major agro-industrial corporations, and situ-
ated in Bank-financed research institutes in borrowing coun-
tries. In short time, the Bank’s large capital flows into the
South were explained in terms of the financing of poverty al-

The Rise of the Bank 

leviation, basic needs, and the green revolution. As a conse-
quence of the Bank’s well-financed knowledge production ma-
chinery, one could find middle-class people almost anywhere
with an opinion about how to help poor peasants in India,
Brazil, or Kenya.

In no small part because of the World Bank’s metamor-
phosis during the s and early s, development power/
knowledge writ large became common sense. The Bank’s role
as global economic and political manager became more en-
trenched during the s, when the Third World debt crisis it
helped to create further reduced the political autonomy of
borrowing countries while increasing its own. The Bank’s phe-
nomenal rise to power, however, also induced the conditions
for its own legitimation challenges. The Bank could no longer
pretend to be the dispassionate technical expert offering ad-
vice from an apolitical distance when it was also making the
daily decisions for finance ministers and central bankers in its
client countries (i.e., Mexico, sub-Saharan African countries).
As a consequence, at the height of the World Bank’s hegemony,
the Bank became a target of a growing worldwide movement
with street riots, parliamentary demands, and mass mobiliza-
tions to try to close it down. Forced to “reform or die,” the
World Bank experienced yet another transformation in the
s, an equally profound shift, to green neoliberalism.

An Auspicious Start

In the beginning, the World Bank was just an afterthought. In
May , the U.S. government invited forty-four countries to
participate in a conference at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire,
to consider creating an international monetary fund to rebuild
international currencies sunk by the war (George and Sabelli

 The Rise of the Bank

; Mason and Asher ). The invitation included the idea
of “possibly a Bank for reconstruction and development,” but
John Maynard Keynes and the British were against it. Of the
fourteen days spent in Bretton Woods, one participant esti-
mated that no more than a day and a half was dedicated to dis-
cussing this possibility (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ).
Keynes did see the sense in some international coordination
over the rebuilding effort, but “international” clearly meant
Europe, which in turn translated only to the imperial West. He
argued that with “proper” economic management, govern-
ments could “have a boom that would raise the standard of
living of all Europe to the levels of America today.” When
Keynes was asked, “Does this apply to India and the rest of the
(British) Empire?” he replied, reflecting the colonial view of
the day, “That must wait until the reconstruction of Europe is
much further advanced” (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ).
In the mid-s, much of the South, with Latin American ex-
ceptions, was still colonized, and Western leaders still had em-
pire on their minds, even as the war was destroying European
economies and attenuating their colonial power. Consequently,
although some delegations from the South were invited to at-
tend, they knew enough to articulate their needs in ways that
emphasized imperial self-interest.

Indeed, as one observer noted, “at Bretton Woods, the de-
veloping countries tended to view (or at least present) them-
selves more as new, raw-material-producing nations and less as
countries with general development problems” (Bauer, Meier,
and Seers , p. ). Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, and Bolivia had
their own proposals on how to steer the global postwar econ-
omy: recalibrate prices for raw-material goods from the South
and manufactured goods from the North, which were “notori-
ously far out of proportion” before the war. To Southern dele-

The Rise of the Bank 

gates, the price gap was the fundamental reason their econo-
mies were imperiled. At Bretton Woods, Southern delegates
tried to put this issue on the table. A Mexican delegate tactfully
argued that Europe could not be reconstructed without the
raw materials and the markets of the South: wouldn’t capital
be best spent in the colonies to help reconstruct Europe (Kapur,
Webb, and Lewis , p. )? In the end, it did not matter
much what these delegates argued; proposals from the South
were not taken seriously by the organizers from the United
States and the United Kingdom.

Keynes, in fact, anticipated such arguments. He preferred
a completely different meeting format: a one-on-one meeting
between the British and the United States. In private, Keynes
remarked that with “twenty-two countries which clearly have
nothing to contribute . . . [the meeting will be] the most mon-
strous monkey-house assembled for years” (Kapur, Webb, and
Lewis , p. ). But Harry White, assistant to U.S. Treasury
Secretary Henry Morgenthau, was much more sanguine and
strategic: “There’s nothing that will serve to drive these coun-
tries into some kind of—ism—communism or something
else—faster than having inadequate capital” (Kapur, Webb,
and Lewis , p. ).

Just as the British perspective on the Bretton Woods con-
ference was starkly summarized by Keynes in this chapter’s
opening epigraph, the U.S. position is outlined in the follow-
ing State Department press release from the first day of the
(July)  conference:

The purpose of the Conference is . . . wholly within
the American tradition, and completely outside po-
litical consideration. The United States wants, after
this war, full utilization of its industries, its facto-
ries and its farms; full and steady employment for

 The Rise of the Bank

its citizens, particularly its ex-servicemen; and full
prosperity and peace. It can have them only if cur-
rencies are stable, if money they receive on the due
date will have the value contracted for—hence the
first proposal, the Stabilization Fund [i.e., the IMF].
With values secured and held stable, it is next desir-
able to promote world-wide reconstruction, revive
normal trade, and make funds available for sound
enterprises, all of which will in turn call for Ameri-
can products hence the second proposal for the
Bank for Reconstruction and Development [i.e.,
the World Bank]. (U.S. Department of State ,
p. , as cited in Peet , p. )

From these “monkey house” histrionics emerged the Interna-
tional Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), or
the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.2 Be-
ginning without much direction or trust in it by the leading
Western powers, the World Bank began to find its personality
under its second president, one of the most powerful men in
the “American Establishment,” Wall Street veteran John Mc-
Cloy (Bird ).3 McCloy’s initial measures clearly reflected
the type of institutional character he sought to create. For ex-
ample, when the first three loan applications came in to the
Bank from France, Poland, and Chile, McCloy worked quickly
to select only France as a recipient, sending a strong tough love
message to the watching world. As his biographer notes:

By April , . . . McCloy decided that the first loan
would go to the French. . . . The terms would be
tough: The Bank would lend only half of the re-
quested $ million, Bank officers would monitor
end use of the funds, and the French government

The Rise of the Bank 

would have to pledge that the repayment of the
Bank’s loans would have absolute priority over any
other foreign debt. Furthermore, the Bank would
closely supervise the French economy to ensure that
the government took steps to balance its budget, in-
crease taxes, and cut consumption of certain luxury
imports. The French protested that such conditions
infringed on their sovereignty. But when McCloy
refused to budge, they reluctantly agreed to his
terms. Simultaneously, the [U.S.] State Department
bluntly informed the French that they would have
to “correct the present situation” by removing any
communist representatives in the Cabinet. The
Communist Party was pushed out of the coalition
government in early May , and within hours, as
if to underscore the linkage, McCloy announced
that the loan would go through. Even then, he
warned that the French would not receive the loan
until the Bank successfully floated $ million
worth of bonds on the New York market. . . . This
was exactly the message McCloy intended to convey
to Wall Street. For the next two years, he planned to
run the Bank as if its clients were private Wall Street
investors and not the forty countries that had joined
in the hope of receiving development aid. (Bird ,
pp. ,  – )

Selectivity, caution, and Wall Street respectability were
the mantras of the early World Bank and the signal sent to po-
tential borrowers as to what lay in store for them. These ideals,
however, rapidly gave way to the reality that the Bank’s poten-
tial client base in Europe and Japan had been erased by the U.S.
government’s Marshall Plan. In direct competition with the

 The Rise of the Bank

Bretton Woods institutions, the Marshall Plan, a multibillion-
dollar giveaway by comparison, was the antithesis of the World
Bank’s mandate: it was indiscriminate, massive, and seemingly
free (Kolko and Kolko ; Wood ). The Marshall Plan
was a social welfarist project deployed to jumpstart Europe’s
capitalist economy through a large infusion of capital. Indeed,
because of the Marshall Plan, the Bank had to reinvent itself as
a bank for the non-European world, albeit one guided by strict
(colonial) rules and regulations that stood in stark contrast to
the ones catering to postwar Europe. As highly inequitable
colonial-imperial relations had been the norm, the different
approaches to Europe and the colonies easily passed as legiti-
mate, dispassionate, and rational for leaders and constituents
from the United States and Western Europe.4 In this fashion, a
major postcolonial discourse of development was launched.

Wall Street had a clear revulsion for anything but the
most “sound” financial investment, as defined by Wall Street
and its officials employed by the Bank.5 For example, as the
Bank’s treasurer from  to , Robert Cavanaugh under-
stood that his main priority was to allay Wall Street’s fears of
financing risky investments in the colonies. For Cavanaugh,
the Bank was constrained in the early years by Wall Street’s re-
fusal to allow the Bank to invest in what later became its staple
development areas, namely, public education, health, and
housing: “If we got into the social field . . . then the bond mar-
ket would definitely feel that we were not acting prudently
from a financial standpoint . . . if you start financing schools
and hospitals and water works, and so forth, these things don’t
normally, and directly increase the ability of a country to repay
a borrowing” (Cavanaugh ).6 During the Bank’s first twenty
years, only the most direct investments in “productive capital”
(i.e., roads, ports, power plants) were promoted.7 Interviews
with the managerial elite who served the World Bank in its first

The Rise of the Bank 

few decades demonstrate that every decision regarding the
fundamental architecture of the World Bank, and its potential
stability and growth, hinged on pleasing the five nations with
the largest vote in the Bank—the “Big Five” countries (the
United States, Japan, Germany, the UK, and France) and their
firms.8 Every project was negotiated in terms of which of these
countries’ currencies would be used and whose financial inter-
mediaries and capital goods would be purchased.9 Only in
hindsight might this seem abnormal: foreign currency and in-
vestment were extremely scarce and precious, and for the re-
building economies of France and Japan, every yen and franc
counted. In discussions of the third world, there was no rea-
son to bring up such concerns as poverty alleviation or local
needs. That this should surprise us today precisely reflects the
hegemonic effect of just a few decades of contemporary World
Bank developmentalism. At the start, the role of the Bank was
unambiguous and its beneficiaries so few that they were all on
a first name basis.

Meanwhile, U.S. political leaders demanded something
quite different from the World Bank. While senior Bank man-
agement strove to persuade economists, including some of its
own, that the non-European world was more predictable, vis-
ible, and attractive than they might believe (Kapur, Webb, and
Lewis , p. ), the U.S. government pushed the Bank to act
for U.S. strategic purposes. Whereas McCloy’s Bank preferred
strict and unforgiving loan policies based on “economic” cri-
teria, the U.S. government insisted that the Bank work only
with countries identified as friends of the United States. The
Bank could not lend to Guatemala and Ceylon, for example,
because of the political position of the parties in power (Kapur,
Webb, and Lewis , p. ). When conservatives within the
Bank and on Wall Street objected to the idea of generous or

 The Rise of the Bank

“soft” loans with low interest and long repayment schedules—
now the Bank’s modus operandi—Secretary of State Dulles
argued: “It might be good banking to put South America
through the wringer, but it will come out red,” that is, commu-
nist (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ). Because of U.S. po-
litical power, Turkey, Egypt, and brutal authoritarian regimes
in Latin America received generous and unscrutinized loans
that were matched by substantial U.S. military and foreign aid
(Payer , p. ), while more “economically worthy” coun-
tries received none.10

Clearly, in this first period of its history, the Bank was
heavily constrained both by the conviction it shared with Wall
Street that “loose lending” had precipitated the pre–World
War II financial collapse and by political pressure from the
United States . Each loan was a painstaking process marked for
its ability to ruffle the fewest feathers in Washington, New
York, and London. It quickly became clear to Bank presidents
and staff that the Bank was doomed to stagnate. Indeed, the
first president, Eugene Meyer, stayed on only from June to De-
cember , saying after his abrupt resignation, “I could stay
and fight these bastards, and probably win in the end, but I’m
too old for that” (Kraske , p. ). John McCloy lasted for
two arduous years before he had enough.

To navigate out of these political straits, the Bank had to
prove it could provide steady profits to its bondholders while
sustaining the confidence of political elites—two different but
related constituencies. Postcolonial “public” banking was new
to the world; it had to be invented in a form agreeable to the
Bank’s Western founders and constituents before it could take
root. As one of the Bank’s first senior officials noted, people at
the Bank “didn’t know much about the developing world ex-
cept as colonies. They didn’t know much about development

The Rise of the Bank 

lending, didn’t know much about development economics.”11

In fact, these ideas of economy had to be invented, and Keynes
and his colleagues were the early inventors (Mitchell ).
This suggested that the World Bank had to invent more than
just “safe” loans. Rather, it needed to construct a whole new way
of thinking about its role in the world and the institutional in-
frastructure to cultivate and reproduce that new vision.

In sum, after its inception, the Bank’s mission shifted
from reconstruction of Europe to development of Europe’s re-
maining and former colonies, and from intervention not as bi-
lateral representatives of eroding empires but as a multilateral
apolitical doyen of the new global economy. The odds of suc-
cess were not good. Northern political and financial institu-
tions insisted that these worldly endeavors were irrational,
wasteful, and counterproductive, as this type of development
lending looked to them like preferential “subsidies” to the for-
mer colonies. Under such overwhelming skepticism and criti-
cism, it was slow going for the Bank in its first two decades. In
fact, the World Bank remained a rather minor player until
Robert McNamara, the man who ran the ignominious war in
Indochina, took over.

The McNamara Era

In addition to devastating Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, the
U.S. war in Indochina undermined the United States’ domi-
nant position in the global economy. It also had a profound
and generative effect on the World Bank. As the United States’
share of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) fell precip-
itously, from a high of  percent in the early s to a low of
 percent by the early s (Gwin ), so too did its ability
to dominate the Bank and its capital flow. With the decline of

 The Rise of the Bank

U.S. hegemony in the international political economy arose
new opportunities for the Bank to assert its own limited power.

President Johnson, mired in a war he was losing badly,
had no choice but to fire Secretary of Defense McNamara, but
he wanted to do it in a face-saving way. So he gave McNamara
the less-than-glamorous job of running the World Bank. Upon
receiving the position, and amidst worldwide acrimony to-
wards him and “his war,” McNamara, in his characteristically
obsessive manner, sequestered himself in his office, immersed
himself in numbers, charts, and tables, and two weeks later
resurfaced with two main goals for reorganization. As he wrote
in his personal notes, his strategies were, first, to “develop new
sources of financing: try to increase the holdings of the Bank’s
securities by the central Banks. Break into the European pen-
sion trust market. . . . Obtain approximately $ million per
year from Kuwait, the head of the Kuwaiti Fund is young, ed-
ucated at California and HBS [Harvard Business School]” (May
, , cited in Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ).12 His
second strategy was to develop new mechanisms to protect the
Bank against funding risks: “In the event the U.S. Government
refuses permission for large borrowing for FY , develop a
plan for standby credit with commercial banks.”

Realizing from the start that the Bank he inherited was
weak and ineffectual, McNamara wanted to increase its power
base by finding—or creating—new sources of finance. In-
deed, he riled everyone when he announced with a frankness
uncharacteristic of the staid Bank, that the project of develop-
ment he had inherited had failed abysmally. Poverty increased
and lending was sluggish; populations were growing and the
Bank’s resources were shrinking. Something had to be done,
and quickly. Institutionally, the Bank had little autonomous
power to expand and innovate upon the project of develop-

The Rise of the Bank 

ment; it had become a supplicant to the old-boys’ network that
McNamara himself, as a former Harvard Business School pro-
fessor, Ford Motor Company CEO, Ford Foundation board
member, and secretary of defense, knew so intimately. None-
theless, as the newly anointed World Bank president, he sought
to wrench control of the Bank from these Northern elite net-
works while tapping into their capital and power: have them
work for the Bank rather than the other way around. In , the
Bank was stagnating under the weight of the U.S. and European
bond markets, which were demanding fiscal prudence and high
returns; the U.S. government was continuing to support loans
in its political interest; and the U.S. Treasury and key corporate
lobbies wanted American firms to benefit from (or certainly not
be hurt by) World Bank loans. The World Bank was financially
solid but, despite its grandiose name, it was weak and severely
underutilized. McNamara made two bold moves.

First, he turned to his staff and board. Apparently at his
inaugural senior staff meeting, he listened to senior staff boast
about the successes of their organizational turfs—a long-
standing tradition of optimistic spinning for one’s superiors
(George and Sabelli ; Wade )—until he had no more
patience. He abruptly ended the meeting with a pointed re-
quest: “I am going to ask you all to give me very shortly a list
of all the projects or programs that you would wish to see the
Bank carry out if there were no financial constraints” (George
and Sabelli , p. ). He made his conservative staff ex-
tremely uncomfortable by suggesting that the Bank needed to
unleash its potential. He demanded from them a development
plan for every borrowing country with a list of top priority
projects and persuasive explanations as to their worthiness.
His next move was at his first board meeting, where he told his
cautious directors that he planned to double the Bank’s lend-
ing (Kapur, Webb, and Lewis , p. ). He then expanded

 The Rise of the Bank

his personnel by  percent and started a new staff promotion
policy, in which productivity would be measured by the size
and turnover rate of a loan officer’s loan portfolio. Conse-
quently, in his first five-year term, the Bank financed more
projects ( versus ) and loaned more money ($. billion
versus $. billion) than it had during the previous twenty-
two years combined (George and Sabelli , p. ).

McNamara then turned to Wall Street to promote his
idea of what the Bank could be if it changed its modus oper-
andi. Surprising all, five months into McNamara’s tenure, the
Bank had borrowed more funds on capital markets than in any
calendar year of its history. The Bank was rolling under the
new chief; miraculously, he was able to finance virtually all of
the Bank’s increased lending without soliciting any new paid-
in capital from the Big Five countries. In short time, he had
effectively nullified past controls on the Bank’s access to capi-
tal. “The Bank’s capacity to lend is now based almost entirely
on its capacity to borrow,” claimed the Bank’s new treasurer,
Eugene Rotberg (Rotberg , p. ). It was Rotberg who re-
alized how to unleash the Bank’s borrowing potential by uti-
lizing the nascent market for global bonds—and to do it
profitably. With this remarkable growth in the Bank’s capacity
to borrow and lend, the “McNamara era” began.

T H E F A L L O F T H E B R E T T O N W O O D S

D O L L A R – G O L D A G R E E M E N T , T H E

R I S E O F T H E W O R L D B A N K

The backdrop to political change inside Bank headquarters was
some substantial structural shifts in the global political econ-
omy and a series of momentous decisions made by the U.S.
president, just a few strides from McNamara’s new office. Still
within the loop of decision making in Washington, McNamara

The Rise of the Bank 

was able to quickly insert his Bank into the middle of new
U.S.-centered plans and help the Bank to grow in tandem with
U.S. power. As a result of the tumultuous period of  to
, when a wave of events hit the global economy, the con-
servative banking agenda of the pre-McNamara Bank disap-
peared in a flash (Block ; Helleiner ; Kapstein ).

In spite of money managers looking for good invest-
ments to absorb the worldwide glut of Eurodollars, OPEC
petrodollars, and Japanese yen, a floundering U.S. economy
did not attract foreign investors to its currency, government
bonds, real estate, and firms. In a brilliant move aimed at stem-
ming the free-falling U.S. economy, on the recommendation of
his economic advisor Paul Volcker, President Nixon pulled out
of the postwar Bretton Woods system of fixed currency that
tied all world currencies to a gold value through the U.S. dol-
lar. By forcing the gold-dollar standard to collapse and then by
liberalizing international financial relations against the will of
Western Europe and Japan, the United States skillfully placed
the burden of its huge deficit upon other states and investors.
When foreign investors purchased U.S. assets and dollars in
order to participate more actively in global markets, they were
also assuming the U.S. deficit risks as well as buoying the U.S.
economy. This move to deregulate international finance capi-
tal also shifted the balance of power away from state-managed
financial institutions (and national development projects) to
private financial institutions and capital investors. Nixon’s
bold decision sparked an incredible rise in speculative capital
activity that would, by the s, shift hundreds of billions of
dollars across national borders and national currencies with
the bat of an eye and beyond the control of national govern-
ments. But more immediately, holders of the abundant finan-
cial capital were enticed by McNamara to invest in World Bank

 The Rise of the Bank

“global bonds,” which would help finance large productive
capital investments in undercapitalized markets in the third
world. By promising a range of risk guarantees to these in-
vestors, McNamara tapped into their surplus capital assets,
dramatically expanded the Bank’s lending base, and began to
finance his vision of large projects in the highly volatile post-
colonial world. But Rome was not built in a day, and Mc-
Namara had much work to do before he could take full advan-
tage of this momentous historical conjuncture.

F I R S T R E V O L U T I O N : G L O B A L B O N D I N G

Within weeks of assuming the Bank’s presidency, McNamara
asked his newly hired treasurer, Eugene Rotberg, whether and
how the Bank could increase its access to capital. “Do you think
we can raise one billion dollars a year?” McNamara queried
Rotberg. “Sure, why not?” was Rotberg’s reply. In a  inter-
view, Rotberg explained that fifteen years later, the Bank was
easily borrowing $ billion a year (Institutional Investor ,
p. ). “I think I helped create an environment,” Rotberg
claimed, “where my [Bank] colleagues could raise $ billion
for poor people and where we could attract those funds from
institutions that do not ordinarily lend, directly or indirectly,
to that constituency.”

Rotberg opened a trading floor in Bank offices and traded
assets at highly competitive yields. By the end of the s, the
“pit,” as it came to be called, was earning . percent, or $
million, a year on liquid assets of $. billion (Shapley ,
p. ). These profits not only funded the Bank’s new palatial
headquarters and staff expansion; they enhanced its independ-
ence from its Big Five executive directors. This was a major
break from the past, when each currency transaction had to be

The Rise of the Bank 

approved by the central bank in the country whose currency
was being sold—a disciplinary device imposed by Western
bankers and ministers to prevent the World Bank from spiral-
ing out of their control.

Rotberg searched the world for underutilized capital. He
approached the Japanese for a few billion dollars even though,
at the time, their international bond market was relatively
small. But he knew they had a high savings rate, and so he
tapped into their growing interest in the global financial market
(Institutional Investor , p. ). German markets, then the
coffers of the capital-flush, oil-producing OPEC members, were
equally alluring. Rotberg summarized his strategy in this way:
“What one must focus on is who has the wealth, how fast it is
accumulating and what kind of instrument do the controllers
of wealth want in order for you to take it. Do they want equity?
Do they want to be liquid? Long? Short? Leveraged or not lever-
aged? Fixed or floating? That is essentially what every govern-
ment, private corporation and quasi-public institution has to
figure out worldwide. And once you know that, creation of the
instrument is child’s play” (Institutional Investor , p. ).

By the s, the Bank was successfully borrowing from
countries as diverse as Kuwait, Japan, Libya, and India and
was working with large pension funds and multiple broker-
age firms, not just the U.S. undersecretaries of treasury. The
Bank also diverged from its traditional source of currency, the
U.S. dollar, borrowing in franc, Turkish lira, yen, Kroner, bo-
livares, and rupees.

The McNamara-Rotberg revolution was as transforma-
tive for the World Bank as it was for the world of international
finance.13 Because of the Bank’s new ability to borrow globally,
it gradually ceased to rely on Northern governments and their
paid-in capital. Whereas in  the Bank received $ billion
worth of paid-in capital from twenty Western countries and

 The Rise of the Bank

borrowed $. billion from financial markets, by , it col-
lected $. billion in paid-in capital and a whopping $ billion
from the global bond market (Rotberg ). Its power alle-
giances became much more dispersed because it never bor-
rowed too much in one place or currency and it worked to cre-
ate new markets and investment tools in new locations around
the world.

As remarkable as these feats were for the new World Bank,
it paradoxically suffered from an inability to stimulate—of all
things—demand for its capital. After twenty years, the Bank
was still short of borrowers and loan packages that could sat-
isfy its rigorous approval requirements. Borrowing countries,
soured by political and institutional constraints on the loan-
approval process, had difficulty agreeing with Bank staff on
projects. To utilize effectively this huge influx of “development
capital” required a few more revolutions from above.

A N E W A G E N D A

The World Bank’s first twenty-five years were marked by a cau-
tious approach to investment. Most Bank loans went into areas
of infrastructure deemed necessary to stimulate economic
growth, but not to actually grow the Bank, which would have
been frowned on by the U.S. Treasury and Wall Street. To as-
sure secure results, the Bank also loaned only to the more
affluent countries. From  to , the Bank loaned ap-
proximately $ billion, most of which went to high- and
middle-income borrowers, including Japan, Italy, France, and
the Netherlands.14 When McNamara assumed control, he
made public his astonishment about how little the Bank actu-
ally loaned in the name of “equity” and “poverty alleviation”
and about the failure of its development model in general. In
his early speeches and in private, he argued emphatically that

The Rise of the Bank 

most Bank loans completely bypassed the “poorest  percent”
(McNamara ; McNamara ).

McNamara, by contrast, wanted to lend to the poorest
countries and for concerns that had been consciously avoided
by the Bank’s economically prudent managers. In his first pub-
lic speech as Bank president, McNamara noted that since ,
in the developing world “the average annual growth thus far
has been .%. . . . And yet . . . you know and I know that these
cheerful statistics are cosmetics, which conceal a far less cheer-
ful picture. . . . [M]uch of the growth is concentrated in the in-
dustrial areas, while the peasant remains stuck in his imme-
morial poverty, living on the bare margin of subsistence”
(McNamara , pp.  – , as cited in Kapur, Webb, and Lewis
, p. ).

In a dramatic shift, he began to use the language and po-
litical strategy of “development” rather than “investment bank-
ing,” borrowing liberally from old and new political discourses.
Whereas today this new development discourse may seem for-
mulaic and predictable, for the time, and the institution, it was
disconcertingly novel and risky. From the beginning of his
presidency, McNamara wanted to put Bank money into the
hands of the “absolute poor,” a radical concept to his banking
clients. Loan composition also greatly changed as McNamara
insisted on shifting the focus to agriculture and rural develop-
ment, a sector universally shunned for being much too dicey
and unproductive for capital. Yet, McNamara argued boldly
that no amount of investment in coal production or port de-
velopment would directly help the poor, since their lack of ac-
cess to new technologies, capital, and know-how—and their
absolute numbers—were the primary reason the investment
banking model of development had failed.

According to McNamara, the Bank needed to turn its full
attention to third world rural peasants if it wanted to solve

 The Rise of the Bank

the problems of poverty and underdevelopment. From his
vantage point, the key question became: what was the most
efficient vehicle for reaching the peasantry so that their lives
could be transformed? This, of course, was precisely the con-
cern of elite policy circles in the nascent U.S. Agency for Inter-
national Development, the Council on Foreign Relations, the
CIA, and the Defense and State departments, and it reflected
the fears of many who believed that the war in Indochina was
making it harder to win the hearts and minds of third world
peasants, whose participation in rebellions and revolutions
around the world seemed to be growing. Perhaps he under-
stood better than most from his experience in Vietnam that in-
stabilities around the world would not be ameliorated by pri-
vate capital investment but required public funding and a more
comprehensive approach.15 Hence, over time, the McNamara
Bank, with its virtually unlimited access to capital, blanketed
whole regions with new kinds of projects, shifting from indi-
vidual loans in specific types of infrastructure to society-wide
interventions.

In one of his earliest speeches, to the annual meeting of
the board of governors of the World Bank in September ,
he spoke at length on how deep he expected Bank interven-
tions to go in “poor” countries: “to help them rise out of the pit
of poverty in which they had been engulfed for centuries
past. . . . Our aim here will be to provide assistance where it
will contribute most to economic development. This will mean
emphasis on educational planning, the starting point for the
whole process of educational improvement. It will mean ex-
pansion of our support for a variety of other educational ac-
tivities, including the training of managers, entrepreneurs, and
of course, agriculturalists. . . . To carry out this program we
hope over the next five years to increase our lending for edu-
cational development at least threefold.”16

The Rise of the Bank 

But the most significant expansion was in agriculture,
which McNamara defined as the “stepchild of development.”
“Here again there has never been any doubt about [agricul-
ture’s] importance. Two-thirds of the people of the developing
world live on the soil, yet these countries have to import an-
nually $ billion of food from the industrialized nations. Even
their diet is so inadequate, in many cases, that they cannot do
an effective day’s work and, more ominous still, there is grow-
ing scientific evidence that the dietary deficiencies of the par-
ent are passed on as mental deficiencies to the children” (Mc-
Namara , p. ).

To resolve the problem, McNamara proposed to bring to
Asia, Africa, and Latin America the green revolution, an inte-
grated project of high-yield-variety seeds, fertilizer, irrigation,
capital, and technical support. “In the past,” he noted:

Investment in agricultural improvement produced
but a modest yield; the traditional seeds and plants
did better with irrigation and fertilizer. But the in-
crease in yield was not dramatic. In the past twenty
years, however, research had resulted in a break-
through in the production of new strains of wheat
and rice and other plants that can improve yields
by three to five times. What is more, these new
strains are particularly sensitive to the input of water
and fertilizer. Badly managed, they will produce
little more than traditional yields, but with correct
management they will give the peasant an unprece-
dented crop.

Here is an opportunity for irrigation, fertilizer,
and peasant education to produce near miracles.
The farmer himself in one short season can see the
beneficial results of that scientific agriculture that

 The Rise of the Bank

has seemed so often in the past to be a will-o’-the-
wisp, tempting him to innovation without benefit.

Our task now is to enable the peasant to make
the most of this opportunity. (McNamara ,
pp. -)

Although McNamara’s idea for poverty alleviation fo-
cused heavily on the rural sector and the undercapitalized
“small farmer,” his ambitious plans for the developing world
did not end there. Whereas in the pre-McNamara era, the Bank
loaned no money for primary school education and very little
for nonformal education, by the end of his tenure, lending for
education increased substantially, almost half of which went to
primary and nonformal education to attack the problem of
low literacy rates. McNamara also pushed for nutrition, popu-
lation control, and health components to rural projects, which
represented a marked shift for the Bank; he also increased
lending for urban poverty concerns, starting projects for low-
cost housing and slum rehabilitation. At first, these invest-
ments dismayed the dominant powers in development financ-
ing. His staff lacked the resources to fend off critics from the
banking sector and to demonstrate how Bank projects would
contribute to productive capital expansion and overall eco-
nomic growth. By the s, however, these types of poverty al-
leviation investments became standard for the Bank, the trans-
national development agency network (bilateral aid agencies,
NGOs, and charities), and borrowing-state bureaucracies.

O V E R C O M I N G R E S I S T A N C E

Despite the availability of megaplans and money, McNamara
learned that it was not going to be easy to embrace his new
agenda without losing the confidence of the Bank’s main con-

The Rise of the Bank 

stituents, namely, Wall Street, the U.S. Treasury, and the Big
Five political elites. In fact, it required an intensive lobbying
effort as well as a whole new discursive approach: the capacity
to produce a social imagery to rationalize the lending and bor-
rowing of large sums of capital for things other than roads,
mines, and power plants, the bread and butter of the old in-
vestment regime. To convince institutional investors that the
Bank would remain financially strong as it expanded its port-
folio to include many more capital-poor countries and invest-
ments in such intangibles as poverty alleviation, the McNamara
Bank needed to generate a major shift in perceptions and the
institutional means to put theory into practice. Even within
the Bank, McNamara’s new vision was met with considerable
resistance. To win support for his interventionist and expan-
sive development agenda, McNamara needed to sell it as ra-
tional, politically and economically necessary, and profitable.
The effort required a new organizational culture and a much
grander development science.

For inspiration and support, McNamara looked outside
the Bank’s traditional intellectual and financial networks to
new ideas and approaches that were emerging in U.S. and
Western European academic and policy circles. If the postwar
era from  to  was the “development as growth” era, as
economic historian H. W. Arndt has suggested (Arndt ),
then the  to  period was the “social objectives” era.
Amidst worldwide social protest, such influential develop-
ment scholars as Dudley Seers of the Institute for Develop-
ment Studies in Sussex and H. W. Singer of the United Nations
were officially dethroning the hegemony of GNP (gross na-
tional product) as a determining marker of development. Since
substantial poverty and inequality could clearly be generated
in the midst of high GNP growth rates, Seers and others ar-

 The Rise of the Bank

gued, it was time to discard an approach that was exclusively
concerned with economic growth (Arndt ).

The larger political-economic context helped McNamara
convince skeptics that his Bank expansion plans were not only
sound, but also necessary. Growth rates in high- and middle-
income countries were falling, unemployment and poverty
rates were rising, and the war in Indochina had substantially
weakened the U.S.-dominated world economy. The late s
and early s were also a period of street protests and revo-
lutionary challenges to colonial and imperial orders around
the world, the effects of which were to unsettle Northern po-
litical elites, economists, and McNamara himself. Even as sec-
retary of defense, he began to borrow liberally from such en-
lightened policy makers as Barbara Ward, Mahbub ul Haq, and
David Morse (head of the International Labor Organization),
and ideas from the decade-old war against poverty in the United
States. Moreover, as Bank president, McNamara proselytized
alongside powerful third world leaders, such as Indira Gandhi
(who called for a “new international economic order” or a rad-
ical re-balancing of power between North and South), to ad-
dress the poverty question in terms of North-South inequities.
If development experts continued to “concentrate on the mod-
ern sector in the hope that its high rate of growth would filter
down to the rural poor,” McNamara declared in numerous
high-profile venues, “disparities in income will simply widen”
(McNamara , as cited in Caufield , p. ). Further, he
asked, how will the world’s nearly  million people, whom
he called “the absolute poor,” continue to survive on  cents a
day? Rich countries had the responsibility to redistribute their
wealth to the poorer countries, for moral and ethical reasons,
as well as the more pragmatic reason of stemming the tide of
revolution. Vietnam, of course, was the elephant on the table.

The Rise of the Bank 

R E O R G A N I Z I N G T H E B A N K

Once McNamara reinvented the Bank’s mission, he had to re-
fashion the Bank. Robert Strange McNamara had entered the
Bank riding on his reputation of having modernized the auto
industry at Ford Motor Company and streamlined the Penta-
gon as secretary of defense (Shapley ). Described as “an
IBM machine with legs” by Senator Barry Goldwater, McNa-
mara was one of the business world’s whiz kids who trans-
formed corporate managerialism through a completely ration-
alized and numbers-based systems analysis. He then went on
to be part of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ “best
and brightest,” the elite Ivy League boys who navigated the
country through the tumultuous s and s, albeit not
without some very serious miscalculations. To many observers,
taking over the World Bank was to be a salve on his tormented
conscience (Clark ; Shapley ). As defense secretary,
his public speeches claiming “there can’t be security without
wealth redistribution to the poor” fell on deaf ears (McNa-
mara ); from the pulpit of the Bank presidency, they
sounded like prophetic activism. He believed in a frontal as-
sault on poverty, but he found the potency of the World Bank
lacking. At the Defense Department, McNamara worked with
an annual budget of more than $ billion, and he was taken
aback that the Bank lent less than $ billion a year. According
to one of his senior managers, “He kept talking in billions and
then he would correct himself and say ‘I mean millions’”
(Shapley ).

McNamara had a well-known history of instilling, for
the times, a unique managerial culture onto the organizations
he ran. David Halberstam, author of The Best and the Bright-
est, explained it as a pathology that allowed him and his col-

 The Rise of the Bank

leagues in the White House to rationalize the devastating war
they were supporting. McNamara’s quantifications may have
helped numb the public with numbers that the U.S. press by
and large accepted as a legitimate language for describing the
carnage, but they belied pictures on the evening news as well
as the stories from journalists and soldiers. As McNamara’s bi-
ographer noted: “He searched out the enemy, poverty, and
quantified it. He and his staff at the Bank were trying to iden-
tify the  million absolute poor in the fall of . ‘We do not
now have all the information we need to identify the different
groups in individual countries,’ he said. But they were building
a database with ‘present and potential levels of productivity of
individuals in each category.’ Some in the Bank objected that
counting and classifying people as absolutely or relatively poor
was a poor exercise, so to speak. ‘We did a lot of body counting
in those days,’ remarks a staffer, not without irony” (Shapley
, p. ).17

Moreover, the Bank of the early s seemed an “un-
likely vehicle to fix the slums of Calcutta. . . . The  staff
members were overwhelmingly Anglo-American . . . men
from the former colonies [who] were overwhelmingly angli-
cized. . . . Meetings of the Oxford-Cambridge Society were an-
nounced in the Bank’s newsletter. The place had the air of a
boarding school such as Eton” (Shapley , p. ). The cul-
ture of the old Bank was simply not conducive to the McNa-
mara regime. As one Bank staffer recalled: “[In those days,] we
made a loan to Ghana and then waited for years to see how it
came out before making another.” At this rate, progress in the
third world would be snail-like at best, a pace McNamara
found intolerable. He told his closest aide that this was “an
inefficient way to run a planet” (Clark , p. , as cited in
Shapley , p. ).

The Rise of the Bank 

Upon taking over, McNamara infused the Bank with the
same highly hierarchical and numbers-based managerial style
that made him famous at Ford and the Defense Department.
He started by changing the organizational structure from one
that was fastidious, plodding, and risk-averse, to one that was
fast growing, risk-taking, and reached in many different direc-
tions. He insisted that staff members not only increase their
loan portfolios to include new types of investments to reach
the absolute poor, but also that they provide empirical data to
justify the risk. In other words, within an ever-shrinking time
frame as staff promotions became linked to the turnover time
of loans, Bank staff had to simultaneously invent and design
new projects, drum up demand for them, and justify through
data that these projects were necessary for economic growth
and poverty alleviation in borrowing countries and financially
rewarding for the Bank’s investors.

McNamara was convinced from early on that academia
was incapable of supplying the theories and tools that could
help explain and solve the problems he perceived as essential
(Stern and Ferreira , p. ). Both the Bank he had inher-
ited and the academic professions at large had no good under-
standing of, for example, how to get economies to transition
from protectionist ones to ones that used price mechanisms
and competitive markets as vehicles for luring foreign direct
investment. They had no model or formula for measuring and
explaining poverty and its rise or fall in connection to specific
interventions, such as low-interest credit to small farmers or
primary school education to illiterate youth. McNamara had
no confidence in the trickle-down theory of growth; he in-
sisted economists and development specialists had no idea—
certainly not one based on hard, quantifiable facts—how to
solve the problems of poverty, malnutrition, ill health, and

 The Rise of the Bank

rapid population growth. His strategy was therefore to create a
new paradigm in development thinking: to measure, analyze,
and overcome.

In the prevailing culture at the Bank and in the world
where Bank staff worked, it had been the self-evidentiary as-
pect of their carefully packaged productivity-oriented loans
that had kept Wall Street and the Treasury Department con-
tent. An institutional support system existed that affirmed and
reproduced the Bank’s claims that large-scale infrastructural
investments were the way to generate growth and develop-
ment in places incapable of achieving them on their own. But
no internal institutional support system existed to make Mc-
Namara’s audacious claims ring true that “investing in the
poor” was the most efficient route to growth with equity in the
third world. Nor was anyone in the larger community of con-
stituents, development officials, or economists prepared to ac-
cept the financial soundness of such investments. That was a
perception that McNamara’s team had to create. The World
Bank thus became central headquarters for research, eco-
nomic modeling, data collection, report writing, and dissemi-
nation of information on the so-called less developed world.

The impetus to develop an institutional capacity to jus-
tify the Bank’s dramatic expansion and its involvement in new
types of work and new experiments in the field of develop-
ment rapidly took on a life of its own. The job required data,
greater involvement in borrower countries, and the establish-
ment of a transnational division of labor that included, over
time, the adoption, adaptation, and the indigenization of data
collection and project design responsibilities. Following Mc-
Namara’s mandate, teams of professional staff and consultants
traveled on extended “missions” to conduct economic research.
They collected data on standards of living, consumption, pro-

The Rise of the Bank 

duction, and poverty; they also generated analyses of barriers
to change, the workings of societal institutions, and the status
of natural resources. Staff began to focus their energies on
these economic missions as in-country economic analysis and
formal policy discussions with borrowers and other key devel-
opment agencies became part of their regular mission activity.

G A U G I N G C H A N G E

To see how much the Bank changed under McNamara, it is
useful to compare the pre-McNamara Bank with the Bank that
emerged after he took control. In the –  World Bank an-
nual report, the greatest problem cited for the Bank in its early
years was a lack of demand: “The principal limitation on the
Bank’s rate of lending has been the limited number of projects
or programs presented to it, which were ready for financing
and execution. The studies and analyses needed to prepare a
project or program are often beyond the capacity of many less
developed countries because of the local shortage of experi-
ence and of trained personnel” (World Bank , p. ).

To resolve this problem, the Bank’s third president, Eu-
gene Black (whose term ran from July  to January ),
established a Development Services Department and Develop-
ment Advisory Service that offered advice and technical ser-
vices in the preparation of loan applications (World Bank
). In , the Bank loaned $. million. Electric power
accounted for more than half of the total, with Argentina,
Australia, and Mexico receiving the largest loans. Transport,
mainly highway construction (an obsession of U.S. industry),
comprised the second largest category, with loans going to
Japan, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela; a smaller por-

 The Rise of the Bank

tion was invested in railways in South Africa and India; and the
smallest portion was lent for port projects in India and the
Philippines. The only loan for agriculture, for $. million,
went to Kenya, for land settlement costs.

Most of the technical assistance in  was directed to-
ward very specific pre-loan project assessments, such as a
study for a bridge over the Hooghly River in Calcutta, a study
of feeder roads in northeast Nigeria, and a mineral survey in
Surinam. A Bank mission helped Spain set up a development
program, and two-man advisory teams were posted in Chile,
one in Nigeria, and a few were assisting Thailand and Pakistan
on development investment strategies. One hundred and forty-
three government officials attended the Bank’s Economic De-
velopment Institute (EDI) ten-week courses in project develop-
ment and management. The courses were held in English, with
an experimental course introduced in French, and one under
consideration in Spanish. Four hundred book libraries were dis-
patched to ninety-three different sites in developing countries.

In , a typical Bank loan was described in this way:

South Africa/Railway Loan
($ million, -year  ¾% loan)
This loan will help to meet the current investment
requirements of a large program of railway expan-
sion and modernization of the South African rail-
way and harbours. Administration has been carry-
ing out since . Earlier Bank loans totaling
$. million assisted the program, and the new
loan will cover part of the foreign exchange re-
quirements for – . About % of the mining
and industrial freight of South Africa goes by rail

The Rise of the Bank 

and further investment in the railways is essential to
economic growth. The current expansion program
involves an increase in capacity, the elimination of
traffic bottlenecks and progressive dieselization.

Participations: The New York Agency of Barclays
Bank D.C.O; Girard Trust Corn Exchange Bank,
Philadelphia; Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of
New York; Bank of America, San Francisco; the New
York Agency of The Bank of Montreal; Fidelity-
Philadelphia Trust Company; the First Pennsylvania
Banking and Trust Company, Philadelphia; and The
Riggs National Bank of Washington, D.C., were
among the banks participating in the loan for a total
of $,,. (World Bank , p. )

For technical assistance, the following description was
quite common:

British Guiana: The Bank is acting as executing
agency for the UN Special Fund project to survey
the bar siltation and erosion problems at the port of
Georgetown. The field study has been completed
and the consultants’ report is in preparation.
(World Bank , p. )18

Whereas in , the Bank committed just under $
million in new loans for  projects in  countries (World
Bank ), twenty years later, it was committing $. billion in
support of  projects in  countries (World Bank b). By
, when McNamara retired, projects, and the language to de-
scribe them, had changed completely. The Bank was no longer
simply providing its clients with money for large-scale infra-

 The Rise of the Bank

structure; it was now training staff, supporting local research
facilities, and doing “integrated rural development” as part of
its mission, as the following project descriptions indicate:

Brazil: Bank—$ million. To assist the country’s
national agricultural research agency in expanding
its current research programs and to support sev-
eral new programs, funds will be provided to train
scientific manpower and upgrade existing research
facilities. Technical assistance is included. Total
cost: $. million. (World Bank b, p. )

Brazil: Bank—$ million. About , farm fam-
ilies and more than , small-scale entrepreneurs
will benefit from a second rural development proj-
ect in the northeastern state of Ceara that includes
agricultural extension services, development of co-
operatives, assistance to small enterprises, con-
struction of feeder roads, marketing facilities, and
irrigation systems, and education, health, and san-
itation services. Co-financing ($ million) is being
provided by IFADS. Total cost: $. million.
(World Bank b, pp.  –)

Cameroon: Bank—$ million; IDA—$. million.
The incomes of , farm families living in a
Northern province will be increased through im-
proved rural infrastructure, effective extension and
credit services, training, and research. In addition,
financial and technical assistance will be extended
to local agencies to plan, monitor, and evaluate a
wide range of rural development activities. Total
cost: $ million. (World Bank b, p. ).

The Rise of the Bank 

The definition of development’s beneficiaries also changed
substantially as the Bank’s annual reports became a discursive
tool intended for a broader—and more public—audience.
Rather than emphasizing the economic benefits that would
flow to Northern firms and investment banks as these entities
supplied hardware, technical support, and financial services
for projects through the procurement process, the focus
shifted to the various civil-society “beneficiaries” of the devel-
opment process: for example, the “, farm families” who
would be affected by a loan to Cameroon; the local officials,
agronomists, and researchers who would receive “scientific

 The Rise of the Bank

Senior government officials participating in an early World Bank
training seminar, Washington, D.C., . Courtesy

World Bank Archives.

[To view this image, refer to

the print version of this title.]

manpower” training through various Bank projects; and the
research facilities that would be established or upgraded with
World Bank capital (World Bank b). In the McNamara
years, it became inappropriate to highlight the Northern bene-
ficiaries (that is, Northern finance capital) in the loan descrip-
tion itself; in their place were development’s new clients—the
third world poor. Overall, these were not mere rhetorical
changes, designed to satisfy a discerning left-Keynesian politi-
cal elite in the North. Rather, they were changes with deep
meaningful and material consequences.

The Rise of the Bank 

Men working the railways, Nigeria, . Both this and the
facing photograph come from the World Bank annual report
of , a time when such juxtapositions were not perceived

as politically awkward. Courtesy World Bank Archives.

[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]

Sowing the Seeds of Bank Power

World Bank power grew remarkably during the McNamara
years in ways that have now become commonplace to the
world of development and, more generally, North-South rela-
tions. Few today would think twice of calling upon U.S. ex-
perts to offer their know-how to African or Indian farmers
after a bad harvest. The ease with which such information can
be transferred reflects the Bank’s success during the s in
creating both the worldwide institutional structure and the
discursive formations to make such ideas realistic and work-
able. Part of that institutional structure included the facilities
erected to assist the transfer of green revolution seeds and
technologies to major borrowing countries. The World Bank
helped bring the green revolution to the South by offering sub-
stantial institutional support to state ministries, credit banks,
and research centers, and loans for heavy infrastructure, such
as dams, power plants, irrigation systems, and agro-industrial
factories.19

To boosters like Lester Brown (currently director of the
Worldwatch Institute), the green revolution bore “witness to
the fact that careful evaluation, sound scientific and economic
planning, and sustained effort can overcome the pathology of
chronic under-production. . . . A formula for success can be de-
signed for any area that has available the new adapted plant va-
rieties and the other inputs and accelerators that must be ap-
plied in logical fashion” (Escobar , p. ). In practice, the
poor’s pathologies were defined in relation to the technologi-
cal innovations occurring at international agricultural re-
search institutes and agro-industrial corporations.20 Develop-
ment planners, meanwhile, began to intuitively “‘know’ that
villagers have certain habits, goals, motivations and beliefs,”

 The Rise of the Bank

according to Stacey Pigg, an anthropologist working in Nepal.
To the development expert, “the ‘ignorance’ of villagers is not
an absence of knowledge . . . [but] the presence of too much
locally-instilled belief ” (Pigg , pp. , ). By the s,
“miracle seeds” were followed into the third world village by
an entire power/knowledge complex based on a specific type
of elite knowledge production. This became the terra firma on
which the World Bank’s hegemony was constructed. The idea
of a green revolution became world-significant primarily be-
cause of the size of the World Bank’s financial support, and the
new breadth of its development assistance network.

As McNamara sent his staff into the field demanding that
they come back with both solid data and projects in hand, the
Bank generated its own transnational demand for information
about the conditions of the rural poor, transforming the pre-
viously imperceptible millions into visible objects of develop-
ment. McNamara was dissatisfied with the pace of collecting
information. He wanted data collection to match the fast-
paced cycle of the Bank’s loan approval process (Kapur, Webb,
and Lewis ). To expedite and legitimate new loans, McNa-
mara created his own knowledge-generating machinery by
adopting two Rockefeller Foundation-funded research centers
in Mexico and the Philippines, from which he created the mul-
tisited research network called the Consultative Group on In-
ternational Agricultural Research (CGIAR). With a growing
number of Bank-supported research campuses around the
world, the CGIAR quickly became “one of the greatest suc-
cesses in the annals of development promotion” (Kapur, Webb,
and Lewis , p. ).21 Eventually, there were sixteen insti-
tutes comprising the CGIAR system. Through them, green
revolution technologies swept the South. In , innovative
semi-dwarf varieties of wheat covered less than one-tenth of

The Rise of the Bank 

 percent of the total area planted in wheat in developing coun-
tries. By ,  percent was planted with CGIAR-promoted
green revolution wheat, with  percent of the total area for
wheat in Latin America and India under CGIAR varieties. For
rice, by , almost  percent of total area in developing
countries was planted with semi-dwarf varieties, with China
planting  percent, India,  percent, and the rest of Asia, 
percent (Baum , pp.  – ).

Over the first twenty-five years of its existence, the Bank’s
CGIARs trained approximately , scientists, many of
whom subsequently took up prominent positions as ministers
of state, agriculture, and finance (Baum ), as well as CEOs
and research directors for major multinational firms (World
Bank ). This global research enterprise represented a
marked change from the early World Bank, which in  had
only twelve professionals working on agriculture, most of
whom were experts in drainage and irrigation (Kapur, Webb,
and Lewis ). During the McNamara years, the Bank’s agri-
culture divisions could not hire staff fast enough (Kapur,
Webb, and Lewis ).

As the Bank reinvented the professional landscape in
which the international agricultural scientist worked into one
flush with financial and political rewards, this science-industry-
government network enabled the Bank to overcome the his-
toric skepticism of capital markets to invest in rural produc-
tion. With its huge spillover effects on industry (e.g., energy,
fertilizer, chemical pesticides, synthetic seed, farm machinery),
the Bank’s green revolution became extremely lucrative for its
Northern clients. The Bank and its bilateral aid partners cre-
ated agricultural universities and research and policy centers
throughout the South to direct the trajectory of this develop-
ment (Anderson, Levy, and Morrison ; Anderson et al.

 The Rise of the Bank

; Stakman ; Wright ). These prominent national
institutes attracted development dollars and university ex-
changes with American land-grant institutions (e.g., the Uni-
versities of Illinois and Iowa) and economic and law depart-
ments (e.g., University of Chicago), helping to “Americanize”
agro-food systems, property-right traditions and statutes, and
trade and investment laws in the Bank’s borrowing countries
(Dezalay and Garth ).

Overall, the Bank under McNamara took Norman Bor-
laug’s miracle seeds and used them to expand its lending port-
folio in many different directions: large dams to electrify and
irrigate industry and agriculture, mining and factories for
farm-based capital goods, transportation, the development of
market towns, and basic education and primary health in the
countryside to facilitate the green revolution. But the rapid
growth of the Bank’s loan portfolio, associated with this and its
other endeavors, eventually led to crippling effects in the
South: high external debt, loss of diverse food production,
land enclosures that displaced millions of peasants, the dollar-
ization and Americanization of food production, and plum-
meting food prices due to a worldwide glut in agricultural
commodities, for example, U.S. wheat dumped on the world
market (Bonanno ; Friedmann ; Wright ). Be-
cause of highly imbalanced terms of trade, McNamara’s “end
poverty” decade ended with a highly indebted South and a
highly stratified farming system.22 With the devastation of
local systems of food production and the triumph of export-
oriented production, the South became a net importer of
foods from the United States and Europe. None of these
changes solved the problems of development or significantly
reduced absolute poverty. Instead, poverty grew as a result of
the Bank’s development industry.23

The Rise of the Bank 

Although highly profitable for foreign investors, the new
development regime was too costly for borrowers who did not
have the resources to repay the large Bank loans. Combined
with the collapse of world food prices and the spike in oil
prices, trouble loomed. While the Bank’s newfound large cap-
ital assets allowed it to expand beyond its wildest dreams, it
also fueled a mounting debt crisis amongst its borrowers.

Debt and Structural Adjustment

The Bank’s long string of loans helped fuel a dramatic increase
in the South’s foreign debt, which grew at an average annual
rate of  percent between  and  (McMichael ;
Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye ; Toussaint ). By the s,
much of what the World Bank was lending did not go for
bricks and mortar, seeds and tractors, or even research and
training; most went to pay the interest on national budget
deficits (Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye ; World Bank ).
The twin effects of massive borrowing for rural industrializa-
tion and the linking of Southern food and agricultural sectors
to the consumption of Northern-based capital goods and farm
inputs, contributed heavily to the net flow of capital out of the
South and into the North.

Although the impending debt crisis could have toppled
the World Bank’s stance in the world, the opposite occurred.
Because of the vulnerable position of its borrowers and its
unique role as development master, the Bank positioned itself
as one of the major transnational institutions that could man-
age the process of debt restructuring. Despite its deep-seated
entanglement in the roots of the debt crisis, the Bank emerged
from the era, quite unexpectedly, as the newly anointed global
arbiter of debt relations between the North and the South
(Gowan ; Helleiner ; Kapstein ).24

 The Rise of the Bank

Ideally, countries could have repaid their development
loans from revenues generated from the commodities pro-
duced from dams, power plants, and seeds, but the world-
market prices of many of the goods produced with Bank fi-
nancing had plummeted (George and Sabelli ). Many key
commodities that the Bank assiduously promoted for produc-
tion across the South were being replaced by commodities
produced in the North, such as corn syrup for sugar, glass fiber
for copper, soy oils for tropical oils, and synthetic alternatives
to rubber, cotton, jute, and timber (McMichael ). By ,
third world debt had risen to $ trillion and countries were
borrowing large amounts from the Bank and IMF just to ser-
vice the interest on their old loans. Many African countries
were forced to use all their export earnings to service their bal-
looning debts.

One of the most significant effects of the debt crisis was
the dramatic shift in power that took place between borrow-
ing states and the World Bank and IMF. As soon as these sib-
ling institutions assumed control of countries’ foreign debts,
they required governments to reorganize and reorient their
economies. In particular, they pushed them to produce for
export rather than to produce for domestic needs, to reduce
trade barriers and tariffs, and to open up key public sectors for
international competition (i.e., telecommunications, electric-
ity and mining, manufacturing, insurance, banking, and trans-
port). As private lending dried up, governments succumbed to
these pressures and dramatically cut their spending on health,
education, and welfare in order to comply with the new con-
ditions placed on World Bank and IMF loans.

The ensuing era of structural adjustment was supposed
to have been a short-lived “shock” that would help countries
adjust to the oil price hike and ride out a two-to-three-year pe-
riod of economic restructuring, after which liberalized trade

The Rise of the Bank 

relations between North and South would kick in to draw
capital to structurally adjusted countries (Dasgupta ). In-
stead, shock therapy became a never-ending cycle of large debt-
servicing loans and additional policy requirements that fur-
ther destabilized borrowers. By , rather than having a net
outflow of capital, the Bank had a net inflow and received far
more from its borrowers in the form of loan repayments than
it was lending (Dasgupta ; Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye
). By the late s, UNICEF reported that World Bank ad-
justment programs were responsible for the “reduced health,
nutritional, and educational levels for tens of millions of chil-
dren in Asia, Latin America, and Africa,” resulting in a “lost
decade” for many of the Bank’s borrowers (Cornia ).

This lost decade for many countries affected Northern
interests as well, which only served to deepen the Bank’s in-
volvement and commitment to resolving the crisis. For in-
stance, in , U.S. banks had almost half their capital in Mex-
ican loans at a time when Mexico built up $ billion worth of
debt and became unable to pay off its loans (McMichael ).
To avert a catastrophe, the World Bank and IMF bailed out
overextended Northern banks and investors while forcing a
much more interventionist structural adjustment regime on
Mexico. In only ten years, Mexico took out thirteen adjust-
ment loans from the Bank and six adjustment agreements with
the IMF that completely revamped the Mexican state and econ-
omy, eliminating food subsidies, rural public agencies, na-
tional food security systems, and state-owned food monopo-
lies (McMichael ). Yet commercial banks made windfall
profits in Mexico ($ million) and, under similar circum-
stances, in Brazil ($ billion) (Peet , p. ). By , most
new loans across the global South were adjustment loans and
a debt-ridden post-Soviet empire had joined the ranks of the

 The Rise of the Bank

borrowers. The Bank’s adjustment regime had definitively be-
come global.

With the debt and structural adjustment crises, the Bank
reformulated the post- question of democratization and
governance, and the green-revolution era concerns with re-
distribution and equity, into the neoliberal question of the
freedom and sovereignty of capital. The World Bank, IMF, and
WTO provoked a global managerial state of mind that eclipsed
alternative regional and national politics. If the green revolu-
tion transformed North-South relations at the point of pro-
duction, giving rise to a new global agro-food system, then the
structural adjustment era affected relations at the point of so-
cial reproduction, reconfiguring the way in which states and
citizens interact, in what can be called the “government of the
social” (Polanyi ). Spearheaded by the Bank, these over-
lapping regimes of development—poverty alleviation and
structural adjustment—only deepened and expanded World
Bank power in borrowing countries, intensifying McNamara’s
mission beyond his wildest dreams.

These overlapping regimes also reflected a major shift at
the Bank and in Washington, as part of the Reagan-Thatcher
neoliberal revolution, as well as multiple shifts in many other
countries where neoliberal agendas have hatched. Soon after
President Reagan selected A. W. Clausen (president of Bank of
America) as the World Bank president, Clausen cleaned house
of the Bank’s “redistribution with growth” advocates. First he
fired McNamara’s chief economist, Hollis Chenery, a world-
renowned innovator, and replaced him with Anne Krueger, the
Milton Friedman neoliberal. Krueger’s intellectual contribu-
tion to the field of development economics was the argument
of the “rent-seeking” state as a significant drag on economic
growth in the third world (Dezalay and Garth ; Kapur,

The Rise of the Bank 

Webb, and Lewis ; Krueger ); she seemed to be an odd
choice because she was not an enthusiastic supporter of the
idea of development lending. By the end of the Bank’s 
reorganization, many of Chenery’s supporters were fired and
nearly  orthodox macroeconomists were hired. This was
the final stage of what one Bank official called “economic geno-
cide” for the older generation of development economists (De-
zalay and Garth ; George and Sabelli ).

Although structural adjustment became, for the World
Bank and the IMF, the primary program for all countries with
troubled economies, the blueprints for change were based on
ascending neoliberal tenets. Known as the ideological founda-
tion of the Washington Consensus, the neoliberal agenda did
not necessarily originate or evolve in Washington alone. In-
stead, the specifics of the agenda were generated through po-
litical struggles and compromises unfolding through North-
South, as well as World Bank-borrower, relations. This global
debt crisis, derived from volatile flows of finance capital in and
out of the South, catapulted the neoliberal agenda into the
global arena. In many countries, the neoliberal mandate of
lowering trade barriers, opening up markets to foreign im-
ports, reducing the role of the state in production and social
service provision, and eliminating restrictions on foreign cap-
ital has led to the destruction of domestic productive sectors.
In the s, for example, Michael Manley, then president of
Jamaica, described as a “Faustian bargain” the series of struc-
tural adjustment policies he was forced to accept, an arrange-
ment that subsequently killed off Jamaica’s domestic agricul-
ture, dairy, and poultry industries as a result of a flood of cheap
imports from the United States (Black and Kincaid ).
Moreover, dispossessed rural families had little choice but to
work in the new, highly exploitative tax-free enterprise zones

 The Rise of the Bank

that obliged them to compete with the world’s lowest wages
(McMichael ).

The Bank’s neoliberal turn was supported by a whole
network of policy elites based in Washington, as well as pro-
fessional lawyers, economists, business leaders, and techno-
crats in capital cities like Santiago and Mexico City, working in
a variety of state and nonstate institutions (e.g., universities,
the legal system, the private sector, even human rights agen-
cies) and pursuing their own national agendas (Babb ). As
a consequence, the neoliberalism that evolved in Venezuela
looked markedly different than that which emerged in Chile,
and both had little resemblance to the prototypes mapped out
in Washington. As Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth brilliantly
document, the roots of the idea of the “neoliberal revolution”
can be traced through these traveling elites and their institu-
tions of training and work, constituting a North-South insti-
tutional network of neoliberal “technopols” (Dezalay and Garth
). The production of actually existing neoliberalism was
(and remains) a transnational dialectical process, a product
of tension, struggle, and negotiated compromise among the
World Bank, IMF, powerful bankers and political elites, and
scores of actors working in corporations, governments, and
professional societies around the world. Under the leadership
of the World Bank, one significant strand that has emerged
from these transnational institutional practices is green neo-
liberalism.

Tensions between the Green and the Neoliberal

After decades of being ignored and dismissed, and after work-
ing diligently to create a milieu in which there would be few al-
ternatives to its rules, the World Bank of the s found itself

The Rise of the Bank 

firmly at the helm of the world of development. Yet the two
transnational institutions in charge of the debt crisis, the World
Bank and the IMF, did not have much time to celebrate. As
economies crashed and people took to the streets, both insti-
tutions became the focus of scorn, anger, and frustration. No
longer was the World Bank seen as a dispassionate expert offer-
ing technical advice at a distance. Instead, it was blamed for re-
duced public spending; mass unemployment; currency col-
lapse; rising prices for food, fuel, and other goods; and falling
wages and export prices. At the precise moment that the Bank
belted itself into the driver’s seat, many of its client govern-
ments were on the verge of collapse.

Adding to these pressures was a series of high-profile ac-
tivist campaigns directed at revealing and reversing the nega-
tive social and environmental effects of Bank projects. The
image in the North of the happy recipients of Bank aid—the
“objects of development”—was sabotaged as rural peasants
and urban laborers began a series of bread riots and project
protests, including mass marches and fasts to dramatize their
discontent with the World Bank and its policies. In the mid-
s, activists “beyond borders” began to organize to increase
the effectiveness of their protests (Fox and Brown ; Fox
and Thorne ; Keck and Sikkink ; Smith, Chatfield, and
Pagnucco ), such that the Bank’s policies and practices in
the most remote areas of India, Brazil, and Indonesia became
front page news in the North and were the topic of significant
parliamentarian and congressional debates in Bonn, London,
Tokyo, and Washington (Fox and Brown ). They were also
the source of high-anxiety political conflict in the streets of
Manila, Jakarta, and New Delhi. The global master of develop-
ment was on trial in the world’s court of public opinion.

 The Rise of the Bank

In Thailand, activists protested dozens of destructive
dam, mining, and forestry projects in support of the hundreds
of thousands of people, especially ethnic minorities, who had
been forcibly displaced by Bank projects with little compensa-
tion (Parnwell and Bryant ; Rich ). The list of griev-
ances included gross human rights violations and the impov-
erishment of large rural populations through projects that
mostly benefited a narrow set of state-class, urban, and indus-
trial interests.25 In Indonesia, protests erupted against the World
Bank’s extensive support of General Suharto’s Transmigration
Project, a military-cum-development scheme that forcibly re-
settled more than two million ethnic minorities from the inner
islands of Java and Bali to the outer islands between the mid-
s and mid-s.26

Campaigns were also launched against the World Bank’s
support of the Narmada Dam project in India, and the Polono-
roeste highway project in Brazil. Ironically, the Bank publicly
promoted its Polonoroeste project in the Brazilian Amazon as
a leading example of sustainable development, suggesting that
its five successive loans to Brazil would be the key lever to force
a reluctant Brazilian government to take seriously the needs of
the indigenous peoples who lived in this region. Others, by
contrast, saw this massive highway project as the death knell
for the rain forest and its indigenous population, as it would
invite millions of colonizers into a region without sufficient
state authority to prevent clear-felling the forest and harassing
its dwellers—which is precisely what happened. As scholars
and activists documented the destruction, this campaign be-
came a catalyst for a type of transnational advocacy network-
ing that has become remarkably common today (Keck and
Sikkink ).

The Rise of the Bank 

The anti-Polonoroeste campaign became a significant
threat to more than just the Bank’s work in the Amazon. The
exposure of Bank practices evoked strong criticisms on the
part of key Northern policymakers. After sitting through more
than twenty hearings before the U.S. Congress, in which pas-
sionate and media-genic speakers from Amazonian indige-
nous groups, clad in their traditional clothing, testified to the
project’s destructive effects on their communities, some mem-
bers of Congress threatened to cut support to the multilateral
development banks, while others became determined to disci-
pline the World Bank and impose upon it some form of ac-
countability. As conservative Republican Senator Robert Kas-
ten noted in , “When people find out what’s been going
on, you’re going to see people out in the street saying, ‘My God,
did you read this information? Why are our dollars being used
to fund this kind of destruction?’” An official in the Treasury
Department agreed: “I think it’s a disaster, it’s a mistake, and
it’s been going on for years” (Wade , p. ). The fact that
this campaign coincided with Bank efforts to request addi-
tional commitments from European governments and the
United States to replenish the International Development As-
sistance (IDA) fund placed the Bank in an extremely vulner-
able position.

To survive this onslaught of criticism that shook the con-
fidence of Northern policy makers, the Bank responded with
stubborn denial and then, when that backfired, with substantial
organizational change. Through the efforts of a handful of
reform-minded actors within the Bank, the environment be-
came the Bank’s chief area of concern. New theories, idioms,
images, slogans, departments, priorities, and data were gener-
ated at breakneck speed. New World Bank reports determined
that there could be no sustained economic growth without a

 The Rise of the Bank

sustainable environment and just treatment of the ethnic mi-
norities and indigenous peoples living on fragile ecosystems.
Money and other institutional resources were thrown at the
problem. As late as , the Bank had only five staff people offi-
cially working on the environment; by  it had more than
three hundred. In , the Bank loaned less than $ million in
the name of the environment; a decade later, it was lending al-
most a billion dollars. Between  and , budgetary re-
sources for environmental policy, research, and loans grew by
more than  percent a year.27 The small Office of Environmen-
tal Affairs ballooned into an Environment Department, with a
significant body of staff. In , the Bank established a new vice
presidency for environmentally sustainable development.

By the mid-s, environmental issues had become so
central to the Bank’s identity and work that its clients could
not borrow until they had signed off on a National Environ-
mental Action Plan (NEAP), which committed them to “main-
stream” their environmental concerns in national develop-
ment policies. Large-scale projects were no longer approved by
the Bank’s executive directors without rigorous environmental
and social assessments based on a scientific protocol that the
World Bank, meanwhile, was busy inventing. The Bank im-
posed on its borrowers “environmental adjustment” policies
throughout the s (often in concert with its fiscal structural
adjustment policies), which pressed governments into creating
cookie-cutter-like environmental protection agencies; redraft-
ing forestry, land, and water laws; establishing national envi-
ronmental policy and research institutes; and training a cadre
of professionals to carry out environmental reforms. These in-
terventions attempted to make national standards more com-
patible with a set of “global” standards that the Bank and its
partners were working hard to create at the same time.28

The Rise of the Bank 

Conclusion

Although its birth in the mid-s reflected a noteworthy event
in postcolonial history, the World Bank became a powerful or-
ganization only two decades later, under Robert McNamara’s
leadership. McNamara seized the opportunity to expand the
Bank’s role in the global economy at a pivotal moment when
U.S. hegemony was being challenged by Europe, Japan, and the
oil-producing OPEC nations, on the one hand, and by anti-
colonial insurgents throughout the South, on the other. Under
McNamara’s stewardship, the Bank instigated new transna-
tional spheres of political and economic influence in which it
and Southern professional supporters worked together to pro-
duce a new regime of development. McNamara’s remarkable
system of knowledge production and dissemination enabled
the Bank to lend substantial amounts of capital and influence
decision making within borrowing-country institutions as it
never had been able to before. Even after McNamara’s retire-
ment and major changes within the Bank, McNamara’s mark
on the Bank helped it to overcome threats to its authority and
legitimacy and to grow stronger and more powerful, as it had
after the debt crisis and the anti-Bank street riots and mass
protests of the s.

In the late s, the environment became a category of
broad significance in the world of development in part be-
cause of the widespread ecological and social devastation that
resulted from Bank projects and policies. To survive the on-
slaught of criticism that made the Bank into an institution non
grata and attracted the critical eye of Northern policymakers,
the Bank was forced to engage in major organizational reform.
Remarkably, by the late s, the World Bank was setting new
global standards for environmental management and regu-

 The Rise of the Bank

lation such that by the early twenty-first century, no inter-
national organization could afford to stake a position without
working through the parameters set by the Bank on issues that
range widely from biodiversity and sustainable forestry, to
poverty and public health, to fundamental rights for indige-
nous peoples to access environmental resources, to society-
wide rights to access safe water. The Bank responded to its crit-
ics with renewed vigor, increases in finance capital, and global
expansion.

The greening of the World Bank has successfully engaged
numerous governments and development and environmental
activists, as well as Bank investors and borrowers, proving to
many skeptical observers, including those within the organiza-
tion, that it could lead on the environmental front without
compromising its “AAA” bond ratings. But transforming this
massive technocratic hulk from culprit to vanguard would not
be an easy job.

The Rise of the Bank 

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