Development Agency or Bank? Vision and Strategy of the World Bank in the 50’s and 60’s

Abstract

Until the late 1960s, the World Bank presented itself as an institution devoted to making sound and directly productive project loans. This paper brings together historical analysis and theories of organization development to reveal that the Bank was unwilling to lend for housing programs not because these were not sound, but because they were geared toward achieving social welfare objectives and were not directly linked to productive investment projects, such as dams, power stations, and railroads. It was not until the late 1960s that the Bank began to take social issues into consideration, rather late compared with other multilateral institutions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.