World Bank Policy Research Articles

Interrogating an omission: the absence of a rights-based approach to education in World Bank policy discourse

This study provides a discursive analysis of World Bank policy documents in order to reveal the stark omission of a rights-based approach to education, while highlighting instead the support of an economic-instrumentalist approach. Plausible explanations are provided to shed light on this exclusion, including the feasibility critique of education as a right, and the Bank's limited institutional mandate. However, the rationales are presented as unsound and unacceptable justifications for the omission. By drawing on Amartya Sen's theoretical work on human rights and development policy frameworks, this study concludes by arguing for the Bank to integrate into their mandate a conception of education as a human right.

The World Bank ' s Africa Virtual University Project: a revisit

Purpose – The main purpose of using technology in the delivery of virtual learning programs in higher education in Africa is to ensure access and equity as a strategy to develop human resources. Examining how specific educational innovations in higher education are working is necessary. The purpose of this study is to examine the World Bank ' s education policies in Africa with special focus on AVU Kenyatta University Project. In addition, the paper seeks to critically examine the use of information technology (IT) distance learning project initiated by the World Bank in Kenya. The project served as an important pioneering role to eLearning in Africa. Design/methodology/approach – To achieve the primary purpose of the study, a critical analysis of relevant literature was conducted. The literature search included computerized search of accessible and available material on AVU and distance education in Africa. Findings – The results of the study show that AVU ' s design and implementation in Africa was initially flawed like many other World Bank education projects. While distance learning should lower costs of higher education, this was not the case. The AVU project was initially faced with challenges, but, over a period of 16 years, the Africa Region is now considered one of the most dynamic e-learning markets on the planet. The continent has witnessed increased digitization of universities, booming enrollment in online higher education and the rapid adoption of self-paced learning. Research limitations/implications – The concept of virtual learning if appropriately applied could be of great benefit to universities and students in Africa. Thus, design and implementation of innovations in education should be grounded in the relevant theories of learning and should involve educational experts. Originality/value – There are limited studies that focus on the issues of access, efficiency, equity and use of innovative technologies in the design and successful delivery of virtual learning courses in African universities, hence the importance of this study.

ESTADO, MOVIMENTOS SOCIAIS E EDUCAÇÃO DO CAMPO: UMA SINTONIA COM O IMPERIALISMO

O trabalho centra-se nas políticas públicas impostas pelo imperialismo e nas relações semifeudais e semicoloniais do capitalismo burocrático brasileiro. A pesquisa identifica que as políticas do Banco Mundial, estão presentes em todos os municípios do Estado de Rondônia, que se fundamentam no neoprodutivismo (neopragmatismo e neotecnicismo) propagados no Brasil pelo ideário pós-moderno, a partir da década de 1990. Essas políticas foram implantadas arbitrariamente pelo poder coronelício existente em todo território brasileiro. O estudo demonstra que as pedagogias do campo propostas pela Via Campesina não diferem da educação burguesa pós-moderna imposta pelo imperialismo às semicolônias.

Staff Guidance Note on the Application of the Joint Bank-Fund Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries

Low-income countries (LICs) face significant challenges in meeting their development objectives while at the same time ensuring that their external debt remains sustainable. In April 2005, the Executive Boards of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Development Association (IDA) endorsed the Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF), a tool developed jointly by IMF and World Bank staff to conduct public and external debt sustainability analysis in low-income countries. The DSF aims to help guide the borrowing decisions of LICs, provide guidance for creditors’ lending and grant allocation decisions, and improve World Bank and IMF assessments and policy advice.

Constructing ‘Public’ Water: The World Bank, Urban Water Supply, and the Biopolitics of Development

This paper presents a historical analysis of the evolution of the World Bank's policies on urban water supply networks, from 1960 to the late 1980s. The analysis frames urban water supply as an attempt (contested and incomplete) to extend the biopolitical power of developmental states. I argue that the World Bank's agenda was predicated on a set of contradictions (and an untenable public/private binary) that contributed to the emergence of ‘state failure’ arguments by the late 1980s. This perspective enables critical reflection on the historical origins of the concept of ‘state failure’, and on contemporary debates over urbanization, infrastructure, and development.

International Financial Institutions and Health in Egypt and Tunisia: Change or Continuity?

The revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia appeared to herald a re-casting of International Monetary Fund and World Bank policy across the region. Public pronouncements by the heads of both institutions in the months following February 2011 acknowledged flaws in their approach to macroeconomic advice, against a background of worsening socioeconomic indicators, widespread youth unemployment, and widening health inequalities. Evidence on the ground, however, suggests continuity rather than change in international financial institution policies in Egypt and Tunisia, notwithstanding the emergence of a powerful new player-the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. In the long term, new electoral realities and hardening public opposition in both countries seem likely to force a fundamentally different relationship between regional governments and the major international financial institutions than existed before 2011.

Forecasting framework of rice crises time in Bandung-Indonesia

In an effort to give policymakers of food crisis alerts, International Food Policy Research Institute developed a new tool for the early warning system for identifying extreme price of agricultural products. The World Bank is currently developing a framework of monitoring the food price crisis in the global and national levels. This framework focused on price and did not examine other factors that govern the food crisis. Development is not directed to define the time of food crisis but for operational indicators that can monitor how close food prices to a level which is categorized crisis. The indicators are used to predict global food price spike that occurred in June 2008 and February 2011. Analyzes were conducted to select indicators that sounded an alert about the crisis. The best one is then used to monitor where current global prices stand with respect to the selected crisis threshold .The weakness of the monitoring frame work done by World Bank and International Food Policy Research Institute above is that maybe we will never seen rice price hike, but we may can still see the rice crises. We may have no natural disaster but we may still have the rice crises caused by miss management. To overcome the weaknesses of the models studied on recently

Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why? World Bank Policy Research Report: David Dollar and Lant Pritchett

Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why? World Bank Policy Research Report: David Dollar and Lant Pritchett

Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why? World Bank Policy Research Report: David Dollar and Lant Pritchett

Assessing Aid: What Works, What Doesn't and Why? World Bank Policy Research Report: David Dollar and Lant Pritchett

Revisiting the Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries

Introduced in 2005, the joint IMF-World Bank Debt Sustainability Framework (DSF) is a standardized framework for conducting public and external debt sustainability analysis (DSA) in low-income countries (LICs). It aims to help guide the borrowing decisions of LICs, provide guidance for creditors‘ lending and grant allocation decisions, and improve World Bank and IMF assessments and policy advice. The framework was previously reviewed in 2006 and 2009. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the framework to assess whether it remains adequate in light of changing circumstances in LICs. It reviews the DSF‘s performance to date, presents the results of recent analytical work by IMF and World Banks staffs, and discusses a number of areas in which the framework could be improved.

Dynamic multiplier effects of remittances in developing countries

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to simulate the indirect and direct effects of remittances in developing countries.Design/methodology/approachThe paper estimates a dynamic macroeconomic model and estimates the short‐run and long‐run dynamic multiplier effects of hypothetical temporary changes in remittances, as well as simulates the permanent effects of observed remittances.FindingsThe results indicate positive multiplier effects in general, and they also reveal a substantial variability across income categories and regions. The results indicate that low‐income economies are more inclined to spend their incomes on consumption and investments than middle‐income economies and, therefore, have a higher short‐run potential gain from receiving remittances. Low‐income economies typically reside in Sub‐Saharan Africa, whereas middle‐income economies are mainly found in East Europe, Latin America and North Africa and the Middle East. However, actual gains from remittances are highest in lower middle‐income economies because these countries receive more remittances. Generally, the short‐run effects are higher than the long‐run effects due to a sustained dependence of imported goods and services.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper analyzes the effects of remittances on components in aggregate demand.Practical implicationsThe results support the World Bank's current policy recommendation that remittances should be promoted.Originality/valueThe paper corrects the algebraic solution for dynamic multiplier effects in Glytsos's work, written in 2005, and estimates the model for a macroeconomic panel containing 115 developing countries. The paper considers the effects of the net flows of remittances rather than of inflows only.

Uncommon Knowledge: World Bank Policy and the Unmaking of the Knowledge Economy in Africa

The World Bank is clearly one of the most influential global intergovernmental operators for international development assistance. In recent decades, the Bank and other agencies have invested immense technical and financial resources in a troubled and unprecedented mission of revitalizing and restructuring the development of education in Africa. A growing body of critique has emerged that articulates the failures of the revitalization mission, framing these exchange relationships as representing nothing but new patterns of embedded neocolonialism, dependency, and geopolitical asymmetry. The aim of this paper is to contribute to and disrupt these unfolding debates by examining how a set of theoretical paradigms have shaped the World Bank's priorities and approaches to education and development policy in developing countries at different times. The paper argues that the Bank embraced the neoliberal economic ideology and a narrowly defined interpretation of the ‘rates of return’ calculations to promote higher investment in basic education while systematically marginalizing higher education. The paper asserts that this polarized policy paradigm persisted within the Bank at least until the 1990s and has partly fuelled the preponderance of the critiques of neo-colonial dependency and hegemony. This paper opens a new analytic territory by examining the coordinates of two recent and increasingly significant World Bank policy paradigms: the ‘innovation systems’ and ‘global partnership’ approaches.

Reassessing the Prospects of a Human Rights Safeguard Policy at the World Bank

Despite 20 years of attempts to introduce human rights concerns into formal World Bank policy, and increasing recognition of the importance that human rights play in the its work, the World Bank has yet to adopt a comprehensive safeguard policy dealing with the relationship between its activities and international human rights law obligations. Two reasons have been given for this reluctance: the legal prohibition on political interference in the World Bank’s Articles of Agreement, and concerns about how effective or appropriate a safeguard policy relating to human rights would be in practice. In this article, I review the legal and institutional obstacles to the adoption of a human rights safeguard policy, and suggest that they can be overcome by using a dialogue-based form of safeguard policy that incorporates human rights obligations incumbent upon the Bank and borrower countries into the benchmarks for the development success of the project.

The World Bank, Laos and Renewable Energy Revolution in the Making: Challenges in Alleviating Poverty and Mitigating Climate Change

The World Bank is among the most dominant actors in defining objectives for energy development. It has announced that it is committed to nothing less than a revolution in the rate and scale of investments in renewables. Renewable energy production is seen to create win–win situations, where both poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation targets can be met. Synergies within the energy–poverty–climate nexus are, however, not self-evident. This article analyzes, firstly, how the win-win policy narrative has emerged in the World Bank's energy policy. Secondly, it assesses how the World Bank has responded to the twin challenge of poverty alleviation and climate change mitigation in its renewable energy projects. In recent years, the two main renewable energy forms the Bank has financed have been large-scale hydropower as an on-grid solution and solar home systems (SHS) as an off-grid solution. Laos is an illustrative case for these trends. There, the World Bank has on the one hand supported controversial large-scale hydropower development that is linked to regional power trade scheme in the Mekong region. On the other hand, it has also funded rural electrification projects that include an off-grid component implemented with SHS. The article discusses what these developments in Laos tell about the World Bank's role in conducting a revolution in renewables. The research material consists of policy and project documents, expert interviews and village-level fieldwork.

Whose trade statistics are correct? Multiple mirror comparison techniques: a test case of Cambodia

Ideally, statistics on the goods traded between two countries should be captured by each side’s respective customs office. Country A’s recorded exports to Country B should be identical to Country B...

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Crossing the threshold: A positive analysis of IBRD graduation policy

According to World Bank policy, countries remain eligible to borrow from the IBRD until they are able to sustain long-term development without further recourse to Bank financing. Graduation from IBRD is not an automatic consequence of reaching a particular income level, but rather is supposed to be based on a determination of whether the country has reached a level of institutional development and capital-market access that enables it to sustain its own development process without recourse to Bank funding. This paper takes a positive approach to IBRD graduation policy, investigating what income and non-income factors appear to have influenced graduation status in recent decades, based on panel data for 1982 through 2009. Explanatory variables include the per-capita income of the country, as well as measures of institutional development and market access that are cited as criteria by the graduation policy, and other plausible explanatory variables that capture the levels of economic development and vulnerability of the country. We find that the observed correlates of Bank graduation status are generally consistent with the stated policy. Countries that are wealthier, more creditworthy, more institutionally developed, and are less vulnerable to trade, financial, and other shocks are more likely to be graduates. Predicted probabilities generated by the model conform closely to the actual graduation and de-graduation experiences of Trinidad and Tobago and Korea, among other countries, and suggest that Hungary and Latvia may have graduated prematurely—a prediction subsequently borne out by the large loans that they later received from the IBRD in the wake of the global financial crisis.

The World Bank policy and practice for projects affecting shared aquifers

The policies issued by the World Bank since 1956 for regulating its operations on international waterways dealt only with surface water, and did not make any reference to groundwater. Nevertheless, since 1990, the World Bank addressed, through practice and precedents, projects involving shared aquifers in the same manner it has been dealing with shared surface waters. The article discusses how the Bank reached and applied such an approach, and analyzes its contribution to the evolution and progressive development of the law involving transboundary groundwater.

Der Zugang zu Dokumenten im Recht der Weltbank. Kosmopolitische Tendenzen im Internationalen Verwaltungsrecht?

<bold>Access to Documents as a new World Bank Policy</bold> The article analyses a new World Bank policy on the access to information which took effect in July 2010. The policy constitutes a fundamental and paradigmatic shift in the way international organisations handle documents and their accessibility for private individuals. It is probably the first time that an international organisation has recognised the principle of open access and set up a two-tier system of legal review. The article discusses the new policy in three steps: A first chapter sets the context. It discusses the reasons that might have led the World Bank to adopt the new policy, referring especially to the basic crisis of legitimacy that international organisations face today. In a second step, the policy is examined in detail, starting with the legal form in which the policy was issued, and proceeding to its content and system of review. The article here draws comparisons to the German as well as the European legal regimes on the right to access of information. Finally, the article ponders the larger meaning of the new policy and proposes a cosmopolitan reading of it. Could it be that the World Bank through this policy reaches out to private individuals, thereby recognizing them as global citizens with a stake in global governance

Comparative advantage, industrial policy and the World Bank: back to first principles

This paper provides a critical analysis of the World Bank's new thinking on industrial policy. After outlining the changing perspectives on industrial policy put forward by the World Bank over the last three decades, we argue that the bank's economists have taken one step forward (the approval for the enhanced role of the state) but also one – if not two – steps backward (by strong encouragement to countries to seek their current comparative advantage in pursuing industrial policy). We argue that a critical analysis of the World Bank's policy stance on industrial policy as on other main issues is essential because of the institution's hegemony in policy analysis of economic development as well as its conditionality, which may now well include what this paper regards as its inappropriate industrial policy. The analysis in the paper combines classical contributions on international trade and the world economy, relevant economic history, as well as Krugman's comments on these issues in terms of modern economic analysis. The paper concludes with reflections on the appropriate industrial policy for developing countries that the World Bank should support.