World Bank – Global Social Justice

Tag: World Bank (page 1 of 2)

World Bank enables private capture of profits

20 December 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

The World Bank insists commercial finance is necessary for achieving economic recovery and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), but does little to ensure profit-hungry commercial finance serves the public interest.

By failing to address pressing challenges within their purview, the second-ever Bretton Woods institutions’ (BWIs) annual meetings on the African continent, in Marrakech in October 2023, set the developing world even further back.

Article by Jomo Kwame Sundaram

World Bank and IMF: An Opportunity Missed

26 October 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

The IMF and World Bank closed its historic Annual Meetings in Marrakech – the first in Africa for 50 years – without delivering a response that matches the urgency of the moment.

The institutions still failed to recognise that we are in the worst global south debt crisis ever. Their rhetoric on the impact of severe debt burdens was not matched by action to speed up their sluggish response so far. Beyond baby steps by the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable to agree on basic elements of debt restructurings, neither the IMF and World Bank, nor the G20 Finance Ministers, took any steps to respond to the calls by civil society and global south leaders, to deliver on debt cancellation and debt architecture reform.

Read Eurodad’s analysis

The World Bank’s ‘Evolution Roadmap’

15 July 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

A civil society briefing – published in response to the World Bank’s public consultation on the ‘Evolution Roadmap’ and endorsed by 74 organisations and indidivuals (see pp. 9-10) – calls for a World
Bank Group roadmap that prioritises people, participation and the planet over profit and economic
growth. It provides an alternative analysis of the current ‘crisis of development’ which the Evolution
Roadmap seeks to respond to; presents key evidence on the damaging effects of the ´Cascade´
approach to date; and proposes an alternative pathway towards a more equitable and sustainable
World Bank Group ‘evolution’, which would reverse the flow of the Cascade, putting public interest –
including grassroots voices, and economic, social, women’s, girls’ and human rights – at the centre
of the public development paradigm for the 21st century, rather than the profits of corporations and
private finance

Read the briefing

World Bank’s “B-Ready” index promotes race to the bottom for workers

7 July 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

The ITUC warns that the World Bank’s new “B-Ready” project signals bad news for working people, as it will undermine labour rights and social protection across employment sectors.

Described as the Bank’s “corporate flagship”, B-Ready presents itself as an index that supposedly measures the business and investment climates in 180 economies worldwide annually.

ITUC’s Analysis https://www.ituc-csi.org/IMG/pdf/b_ready_memo_en.pdf

World Bank: Sowing the Seeds of Poverty

6 May 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

This CAFOD report shows how the World Bank is failing in its duty to tackle poverty by promoting a model of agricultural development that benefits large-scale agribusiness at the expense of some of the world’s poorest smallholder farmers.

Sowing the seeds of poverty: How the World Bank harms poor farmers (cafod.org.uk)

Needed: a Bold Programme to Address the Debt Problem

6 April 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

As governments converge on Washington for the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-World Bank spring meeting, they are confronted with the daunting prospect that 2023 might be the year that the world will be hit by a developing country debt crisis much like that which took place in the early 1980’s that led to the infamous lost decade in Latin America and Africa. A number of defaults on debt repayments over the last three years have served as the alarm bells for a possibly even bigger implosion.

Read the article by Walden Bello

World Bank Reform? A view from the South

28 March 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

The World Bank Group (WBG) is one of the largest multilateral development banks in the world. Its professed mission: to end poverty and promote shared prosperity in developing countries.

But social movements and civil society, especially in the global South, have questioned the WBG’s economic role for decades. They have been criticising the United States’ (US) domination of the institution. The WBG has been opposed for sinking countries in debt, for imposing conditions on said loans, for shaping economies to the benefit of big business instead of people, and even for backing military dictatorships. Seventy-nine years since its establishment, a reckoning is necessary on the WBG’s performance as a supposed development bank.

Read Ibon’s paper

World Bank’s scandal-hit ‘Doing Business’ seeks redemption with revamp

23 March 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

The World Bank is bringing back its flagship annual report on the ease of doing business worldwide after a data manipulation scandal marred the last version, prompting the bank to scrap the project in 2021. There’s a new brand, a revised methodology, and a reformed mission focused on capturing a more honest snapshot of conditions for the private sector.

Waiting to see – World Bank’s scandal-hit ‘Doing Business’ seeks redemption with revamp | Devex

Demystifying Bretton Wood’s discourse on public services

24 January 2023 / Francine / 0 Comments

Drawing on the specific case of IMF and World Bank’s response to the multiple crisis triggered by the pandemic, a journal article shows that there is a discourse-practice disjuncture in the Bretton Woods institutions approach to public services as they continue to favour austerity and market-oriented solutions for the delivery of public services. The article therefore seeks to demystify the institutions rhetoric and demand the adoption of a different way of understanding public services, and social policy more broadly.

Read Eurodad’s article

Tag: World Bank (page 1 of 2)

The ITUC warns that the World Bank’s new “B-Ready” project signals bad news for working people, as it will undermine labour rights and social protection across employment sectors.

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