Refine
Language
- English (4)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (4)
Keywords
- World Bank (4) (remove)
Institute
Birds of a feather?
(2020)
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ascribe to impartiality in their mandates. At the same time, scholarship indicates that their decisions are disproportionately influenced by powerful member states. Impartiality is seen as crucial in determining International Organizations' (IOs) effectiveness and legitimacy in the literature. However, we know little about whether key interlocutors in national governments perceive the International Financial Institutions as biased actors who do the bidding for powerful member states or as impartial executors of policy. In order to better understand these perceptions, we surveyed high-level civil servants who are chiefly responsible for four policy areas from more than 100 countries. We found substantial variations in impartiality perceptions. What explains these variations? By developing an argument of selective awareness, we extend rationalist and ideational perspectives on IO impartiality to explain domestic perceptions. Using novel survey data, we test whether staffing underrepresentation, voting underrepresentation, alignment to the major shareholders and overlapping economic policy paradigms are associated with impartiality perceptions. We find substantial evidence that shared economic policy paradigms influence impartiality perceptions. The findings imply that by diversifying their ideational culture, IOs can increase the likelihood that domestic stakeholders view them as impartial.
World Bank evaluations show that recipient performance varies substantially between different projects. Extant research has focused on country-level variables when explaining these variations. This article goes beyond country-level explanations and highlights the role of World Bank staff. We extend established arguments in the literature on compliance with the demands of International Organizations (IOs) and hypothesize that IO staff can shape recipient performance in three ways. First, recipient performance may be influenced by the quality of IO staff monitoring and supervision. Second, the leniency and stringency with which IO staff apply the aid agreement could improve recipient performance. Third, recipient performance may depend on whether IO staff can identify and mobilize supportive interlocutors through their networks in the recipient country. We test these arguments by linking a novel database on the tenure of World Bank task team leaders to projects evaluated between 1986 and 2020. The findings are consistent with the expectation that World Bank staff play an important role, but only in investment projects. There is substantial evidence that World Bank staff supervisory ability and country experience are linked to recipient performance in those projects. Less consistent evidence indicates that leniency could matter. These findings imply that World Bank staff play an important role in facilitating implementation of investment projects.
The legitimacy and effectiveness of international organizations are often linked directly to issues of representation—not only on their high-level governing boards and in top leadership but also within their staff. This article explores two key questions of bureaucratic representation in the critical cases of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. First, we seek to unpack three essential dimensions of staff representation—nationality, education, and gender—to explain how representation may matter for international organizations. Second, we aim to describe the multiple dimensions of representation in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over the past twenty years by deploying a novel dataset on staff demographics, focusing on ranks with decision-making authority within the institutions. Our descriptive analysis reveals that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have made considerable efforts to diversify their bureaucracies. Nonetheless, representation remains uneven; for example, nationals from middle- and low-income countries, women, and staff without economics degrees from prominent US- or UK-based universities are less present in key leadership positions. These results may be well explained by the particular needs of the institutions’ technical mandates and limits in the supply of qualified staff and, as such, need not be seen as suboptimal. Nonetheless, perceived imbalances in representation may continue to pose external legitimation and operational challenges to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in a complex political environment where such multidimensional representation is important to sustaining the buy-in of donor and borrower countries alike. To this end, we recommend that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank enhance their diversity and inclusion efforts by increasing transparency via reporting disaggregated data on workforce composition and introducing annual requirements to publish progress reports with management feedback to strengthen internal and external accountability.
Birds of a feather?
(2020)
The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank ascribe to impartiality in their mandates. At the same time, scholarship indicates that their decisions are disproportionately influenced by powerful member states. Impartiality is seen as crucial in determining International Organizations' (IOs) effectiveness and legitimacy in the literature. However, we know little about whether key interlocutors in national governments perceive the International Financial Institutions as biased actors who do the bidding for powerful member states or as impartial executors of policy. In order to better understand these perceptions, we surveyed high-level civil servants who are chiefly responsible for four policy areas from more than 100 countries. We found substantial variations in impartiality perceptions. What explains these variations? By developing an argument of selective awareness, we extend rationalist and ideational perspectives on IO impartiality to explain domestic perceptions. Using novel survey data, we test whether staffing underrepresentation, voting underrepresentation, alignment to the major shareholders and overlapping economic policy paradigms are associated with impartiality perceptions. We find substantial evidence that shared economic policy paradigms influence impartiality perceptions. The findings imply that by diversifying their ideational culture, IOs can increase the likelihood that domestic stakeholders view them as impartial.