World Bank and Hegemony

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Ridhima Saxena FSLE 3 (60918) Discuss the changing nature of the World Bank as a hegemonic institution from 1950s onwards with reference to one country study. The idea of the World Bank started taking shape in the second half of the twentieth century and laid its first roots in the Bretton Woods Conference, New Hampshire in July, 1944 in a conference of forty-five governments[1]. World Bank at that point was a collective name given to the twin sister organizations: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It was a brainchild of John Maynard Keynes, an Englishman who dreamt to make an institution that worked for the betterment of the less developed countries and for Postwar Reconstruction. The Bank’s charter[2] affirms that it would be a purely economic institution. When the Bank was founded, its mission was quite clear: to help the reconstruction of Europe and to promote economic growth in the rest of the world. The basic strategy was industrialization. The means to achieve it were foreign finance for infrastructure investments and the protection of infant industry. The theoretical tool behind it was development economics, a new branch of economics. (Pereira: 213) But ever since the Second World War, the Bank has successfully reproduced itself and prospered. Just like its constantly increasing physical size and spread over countries, it has extended its economic grasp and augmented its political power (the grand total of loans that were extended to different countries increased to 10.7 billion dollars(not counting IDA credits which, from 1967, added a further $1.7 billion to the portfolio)[3]. The bank slowly began gaining this invisible aristocracy over the borrower countries and its role from being just an economic institution got elevated to that of a developmental economic
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