Your mission, should you choose to accept it...
Over at Forbes.com Paul Maidment writes of the World Bank:
The Bank's primary mission is to reduce poverty. It faces many challenges in doing so, not least the emergence of China as an alternative lender to the poorest countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, and one with a different aid philosophy and practice.I confess this baffles me.
How is the existence of a second lender a "challenge" to a mission "to reduce poverty"? Surely poverty can be reduced by many methods; if I'm a poor country and I'm able to borrow money from China and get out of poverty, I'm out of poverty. And another lender means that more countries can borrow.
That sentence only makes sense if the World Bank's mission is somewhat more complicated than just "to reduce poverty" - somewhat more, shall we say, ideological? - or if there's an implicit attack on China's "philosophy and practice".
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with a more complex mission, and not that China is necessarily above reproach. After all, they may be the equivalent of Mr Potter while the World Bank is George Bailey. But the sentence is a bit... is dishonest too strong?
2 Comments:
-
At 3:05 PM, May 18, 2007
Anonymous had this to say...
-
-
At 12:45 AM, May 26, 2007
Anonymous had this to say...
-
-
<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->The way the WB works -or is supposed to anyway - is (very roughly) by having rich member nations pool their money and loan it to poor nations. Those nations use the money to become not poor, and pay the interest back into the WB, which WB then loans to other poor nations.
If nations don't borrow from the WB, then they can't pay into it and the WB won't have money to lend anymore.
So, if they borrow from China, then the WB can't carry out its primary mission. (note, this indicates that there are other, secondary missions as well where China could be in opposition)
The inconsistency here is that the WB claims to carry out its mission by promoting capitalism - and what is more capitalistic than having competition?
Sorry to baffle you. What I meant was that the World Bank's way to reduce poverty is through developing economic growth by promoting transparency, good governance and free, fair and open markets and trade. It is an "ideological" view, to use your tern, that underpins the way it lends. China's ideological goal is in part to secure supplies of natural resources and in part to push back the international recognition of Taiwan. It can lend or provide aid on different terms as a result, and more often than not those terms undercut the World Bank's. -- PM
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]