• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Whose Institutions?
• 2. The Globalizing Mission
• 3. The Power to Persuade
• 4. The Mission in Mexico
• 5. Mission Creep in Russia
• 6. Mission Unaccomplished in Africa
• 7. Reforming the IMF and World Bank
• References
• Index

"The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy."-from the Introduction The greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been as globalizers. But at whose cost? Would borrowing countries be better off without the IMF and World Bank? This book takes readers inside these institutions and the governments they work with. Ngaire Woods brilliantly decodes what they do and why they do it, using original research, extensive interviews carried out across many countries and institutions, and scholarship from the fields of economics, law, and politics. The Globalizers focuses on both the political context of IMF and World Bank actions and their impact on the countries in which they intervene. After describing the important debates between U.S. planners and the Allies in the 1944 foundation at Bretton Woods, she analyzes understandings of their missions over the last quarter century. She traces the impact of the Bank and the Fund in the recent economic history of Mexico, of post-Soviet Russia, and in the independent states of Africa. Woods concludes by proposing a range of reforms that would make the World Bank and the IMF more effective, equitable, and just.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Whose Institutions?
• 2. The Globalizing Mission
• 3. The Power to Persuade
• 4. The Mission in Mexico
• 5. Mission Creep in Russia
• 6. Mission Unaccomplished in Africa
• 7. Reforming the IMF and World Bank
• References
• Index

"The IMF and the World Bank have integrated a large number of countries into the world economy by requiring governments to open up to global trade, investment, and capital. They have not done this out of pure economic zeal. Politics and their own rules and habits explain much of why they have presented globalization as a solution to challenges they have faced in the world economy."-from the Introduction The greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been as globalizers. But at whose cost? Would borrowing countries be better off without the IMF and World Bank? This book takes readers inside these institutions and the governments they work with. Ngaire Woods brilliantly decodes what they do and why they do it, using original research, extensive interviews carried out across many countries and institutions, and scholarship from the fields of economics, law, and politics. The Globalizers focuses on both the political context of IMF and World Bank actions and their impact on the countries in which they intervene. After describing the important debates between U.S. planners and the Allies in the 1944 foundation at Bretton Woods, she analyzes understandings of their missions over the last quarter century. She traces the impact of the Bank and the Fund in the recent economic history of Mexico, of post-Soviet Russia, and in the independent states of Africa. Woods concludes by proposing a range of reforms that would make the World Bank and the IMF more effective, equitable, and just.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Reviews the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP), which is a major initiative, undertaken jointly by the World Bank and the IMF, in response to the financial crises of the late 1990s.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

In At the Frontlines of Development former World Bank country directors recount their experiences, both as managers of the World Bank's programs in global economic hotspots of the 1990s as well as throughout their careers in development economics. These essays detail, among many stories of development in the 1990s, how China and India lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while Russia collapsed; how Bosnia and Herzegovina and Mozambique remade their war-ravaged economies; and how Thailand, Turkey, and Argentina fell into financial crisis. These remarkable stories, told in first-person by the country directors who were there to witness them, provide candid assessments of development in the 1990s'what succeeded, what failed, and what lessons emerged. This book is part of a larger effort undertaken by the World Bank to understand the development experience of the 1990s, an extraordinary eventful decade. Each of the project's three volumes serves a different purpose. Economic Growth in the 1990s provides comprehensive analysis of the decade's development experience, while Development Challenges in the 1990s offers insights on the practical concerns faced by policymakers.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)