世界银行的反腐败标准及其对金砖银行制度建设的启示

本文系统考察了世界银行反腐败标准的形成过程及其对金砖银行反腐败制度建设的启示,认为世界银行的反腐败政策经历了一个重要变迁,而后者的动力正是来自于世界银行主要捐款国对本国反腐败议题的重视。自世行成立以来,治理和反腐败问题一直是其不愿触及的"政治禁区",但在20世纪90年代中期后,尤其是在沃尔芬森和沃尔福威茨两任行长的推动下,世界银行日益关注借款国的国内治理和反腐败状况,并将之作为其提供贷款的重要条件,事实上,这与美欧日等主要股东国在世纪之交高度重视国内的反腐败议题以及世界银行自身以股东国导向为准的制度特征密切相关。作为发展中国家自主创立的新开发银行,金砖银行更多地强调借款国主导和采用国别体系,充分体现借款国自身的发展理念和战略,因而应该采用一套更为灵活多样、更符合借款国实际的治理与反腐败标准。     

The governance of the World Bank: Lessons from the corporate sector

The World Bank Group (WBG) is a multilateral organization as well as a large financial conglomerate. The debate on its governance, however, has mainly focused on how to ensure more inclusive decision-making by strengthening the voice and representation of its entire membership. The WBG’s governance as a set of arrangements that enable the principal (shareholders) to oversee the agent (management) has so far been overlooked, even though the adequacy of such arrangements is relevant in all institutions wherein shareholders delegate to management the achievement of organizational objectives. In reviewing the institutional, historical, and current underpinnings of the WBG’s decision-making, we elaborate on the extent to which the Group follows best-practice corporate governance standards that have been designed with the aim of improving shareholders’ oversight. Drawing from a methodology developed by the IFC, an entity of the WBG, we analyze the Group’s internal governance, highlighting which aspects are furthest from (or closest to) current financial-sector best practices. In so doing, we provide a framework for prioritizing the most critical areas in which the WBG’s governance falls short of private-sector standards, and we identify the nature of possible remedies.

Transforming security sectors: the IMF and World Bank approaches

Since the end of the Cold War, donors have come to realise that when security sectors operate autonomously, with scant regard for the rule of law, democratic principles, and sound management practices, sustainable, poverty-reducing development is extremely di?cult, if not impossible, to achieve. Because of the substantial ?nancial resources and technical expertise at their disposal, there is a growing expectation that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund will play an important part in supporting improved security-sector governance. These organisations have, however, long taken the position that, because of restrictions on political activities in their Articles of Agreement, their involvement in issues pertaining to the security sector must be limited. This article suggests that a governance approach to the security sector is well within the mandate of both organisations. And it is necessary for the Bank and the Fund to address the quality of security-sector governance if they are to be e?ective in carrying out two of their core functions: reforming public institutions and strengthening governance.     

The politics of contract allocation in the World Bank

Scholarship on informal politics in multilateral aid organizations investigates all stages of the allocation process - from project identification to aid disbursement and project evaluation. Yet, one area remains almost entirely overlooked in the literature - allocation of aid-financed contracts. This article aims to address the shortcoming of the existing research and develops a theory of contract allocation in a prominent multilateral aid organization – the World Bank. The theoretical argument explores the relationship between formal procurement arrangements and recipients’ control over contract allocation, and the role of this relationship in explaining patterns of contract allocation. My empirical analyses using data on the World Bank’s contracts provide evidence of recipients’ ability to allocate contracts in favor of domestic companies, as well as bilateral aid donors.     

Political Trust,Corruption, and Ratings of the IMF and the World Bank

There are only a handful of studies that examine public support for the IMF and World Bank. Public opinion data on attitudes to the economy feature prominently in these studies. Utilizing data from the Afrobarometer survey, we find that evaluations of the economy, ideology, and a range of sociodemographic factors including age, gender, employment status, health, education, and living conditions are not significantly related to ratings of effectiveness. Rather, we find that political trust and corruption—two very important concepts in the wider literature on individual-level attitudes toward international relations and foreign policy issues—are strongly associated with ratings of effectiveness.     

African rural labour and the World Bank: An alternative perspective

In the context of economic and technological change in the late twentieth century, the World Bank's World Development Report 1995 combines the themes of labour and the global market, celebrating the triumph of the market in efficient labour-allocation worldwide. The World Bank's emphasis on boosting Africa's agricultural export capacity ignores the prevailing hostile conditions which African products encounter on the world market, and the current tendency towards agricultural labour displacement. `Labour flight', particularly of youth, signals African farmers' own disenchantment with farming under present liberalised market conditions. The narrowness of the W orld Bank's policy vision for Africa avoids the social and political implications of rural labour displacement as well as the need for human-capital investment in rural areas. This article argues that the alternative to human-capital investment now may be war and expensive disaster-relief for decades to come.     

Financing the peace: Evaluating World Bank post-conflict assistance programs

Does World Bank aid to countries damaged by civil conflict meet its stated goals of speeding economic recovery and reducing the risk of conflict recidivism? We contend that the Bank’s success depends on its ability to bolster and signal the credibility of politicians’ commitments to peaceful politics and tailor its programs to the post-conflict environment. In the first systematic evaluation of World Bank post-conflict assistance, we estimate selection-corrected event history models of the effect of Bank programs on recovery and recurrence using an original dataset of all World Bank programs in post-conflict environments. Among key results, we find that the Bank tends to select aid recipients according to their pre-existing probability of conflict recurrence and that, once we control for this non-random selection, the Bank has no systematic effect on either conflict recurrence or economic recovery.     

世界银行的经验及其对筹建亚洲基础设施投资银行的启示

世界银行(WB)是全球最有影响力的多边开发金融机构,自成立以来对发展世界经济发挥了重要作用并积累了许多成功经验。本文拟简述世界银行成立的背景、成立的宗旨、职能的变迁、组织机构、资金来源、主要业务等,分析其发展现状、运行成效和存在的问题,总结其在投资管理、贷款评估机制、自我评估机制等方面的成功经验,并对筹建亚洲基础设施投资银行提出5个方面的启示和建议。     

Central Bank Independence in the World: A New Data Set

This article introduces the most comprehensive dataset on de jure central bank independence (CBI), including yearly data from 182 countries between 1970 and 2012. The dataset identifies statutory reforms affecting CBI, their direction, and the attributes necessary to build the Cukierman, Webb and Neyapty index. Previous datasets focused on developed countries, and included non-representative samples of developing countries. This dataset’s substantially broader coverage has important implications. First, it challenges the conventional wisdom about central bank reforms in the world, revealing CBI increases and restrictions in decades and regions previously considered barely affected by reforms. Second, the inclusion of almost 100 countries usually overlooked in previous studies suggests that the sample selection may have substantially affected results. Simple analyses show that the associations between CBI and inflation, unemployment or growth are very sensitive to sample selection. Finally, the dataset identifies numerous CBI decreases (restrictions), whereas previous datasets mostly look at CBI increases. These data’s coverage not only allows researchers to test competing explanations of the determinants and effects of CBI in a global sample, but it also provides a useful instrument for cross-national studies in diverse fields, such as liberalization, diffusion, political institutions, democratization, or responses to financial crises.     

India Inc. and globalization: The rise of neo-liberalism and a transnational managerial elite?

ABSTRACT

In our paper, we present an empirical study that tests claims regarding the purported impact of economic globalization on business elites, namely that elites become increasingly transnational in their careers and life style and neo-liberal in their action orientations. We draw upon the results of a study that (a) tapped life course data for 100 current top managers in India and (b) implemented a collective mindset analysis using in-depth interviews that were conducted in India with retired and serving senior business managers. Our findings indicate that endogenous institutions have an important and enduring role to play in the shaping of careers, as well as generating embedded cognitive frameworks. Drawing from this exploratory study, we propose a set of hypotheses and a research agenda to argue that socio-cultural mechanisms of selection and socialization must be taken into account in discussions regarding the emergence of a global corporate elite.