Bretton Woods Update No.39 March/April 2004The World Bank and IMF at sixty: plus ça change?News|5 April 2004 
Sixty years after their founding, the World Bank and IMF remain the dominant institutions in development but face determined opposition to their role in shaping globalisation. read article... PRSPs: a continuation of structural adjustmentNews|5 April 2004 Debate remains over the formulation and content of PRSPs. Many analysts suggest that they continue the trajectory of structural adjustment policies. read article... Life under the IMF’s magnifying glass: A Zambian civil servant chafes at the collarComment|5 April 2004 The Fund takes to micro-management in Zambia to ensure compliance with belt tightening measures, threatening civil unrest. read article... World Bank pushes Malawi agriculture privatisationNews|5 April 2004 World Bank manoeuvres to ensure parliamentary approval of a controversial agriculture privatisation policy demonstrates the continued influence of the Bank and the problems with Poverty and Social Impact Analysis. read article... The World Bank’s high-risk hypocrisyComment|5 April 2004 the World Bank is not serious about the social and environmental policies it trumpets at global conferences. Senior World Bank staff in its India office indicated that they neither know nor care about procedures that are supposed to make its infrastructure lending socially responsible. This represents institutional hypocrisy. read article... Parliaments: the missing link in democratising national policy makingNews|5 April 2004 Across sub-saharan Africa, good governance efforts depend on the strengthening of parliamentary democracy. In sharp contrast country relations with IFIs reveal weak parliamentary engagement. read article... Disengaging from the Fund: possible and worthwhile?News|5 April 2004 Some countries have clearly benefited from defying the Fund and as it is clearly often wrong it should have competitors, such as regional monetary funds, which can provide alternative advice and funding. read article... Challenges to World Bank report on MDG progressNews|5 April 2004 The World Bank has produced a long new report on how countries and international institutions are performing in relation to the Millennium Development Goals. But the Bank faces severe conflicts of interest in producing such a report. read article... Pakistani hunger strikers seek reparations for damaging projectNews|5 April 2004 In March Pakistani activists observed a hunger strike in front of the World Bank offices in Islamabad. The strikers pointed out that Bank-backed projects have caused serious damage to their livelihoods and the coastal ecology and called for the loan to be suspended. read article... Global warming speaks louder than wordsNews|5 April 2004 The gap between the World Bank's pronouncements on the dangers of climate change and the reality of its lending practices presents an ever increasing danger for the global commons. read article... Acres debarment: Litmus test for Bank on corruptionNews|5 April 2004 The Bank's sanctions committee has reopened the debarment case against Acres International, a Canadian firm whose conviction for bribing an official was upheld by the Lesotho appeals court last August. read article... World Bank faces lobbies on human rights, climate changeNews|5 April 2004 The World Bank has recently faced increasing pressure to adopt strong policies on human rights and climate change. NGOs have been joined by parliamentarians, nobel laureates for peace and a group of religious leaders in advocating for the Bank to adopt the recommendations of the Extractive Industries Review. read article... Congolese groups unite to demand scrutiny of forest policiesNews|5 April 2004 NGOs in the Democratic Republic of Congo have allied to challenge industrial logging in their country's rainforests. In February they appealed to the World Bank and other agencies to halt a plan which would make up to 60 million hectares of rainforest available to logging companies in the coming years. read article... World Bank, IMF: Helping peace or creating conditions for war?Briefing|5 April 2004 Recent involvement in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq has put World Bank and IMF post-conflict operations in the spotlight. While some believe multilateral finance is essential, others argue that the Bank and the Fund are acting primarily as pawns of powerful diplomatic and economic interests. read article... Other stories in this issue |
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