The quality and relevance of the World Bank's research comes under fire in a recent audit that examines a large random sample of the nearly 4,000 reports, books and papers produced by the Bank between 1998 and 2005.
This new report seriously calls into question the credibility of the Bank as the "Knowledge Bank" and provides significant support to civil society campaigns against ideologically based conditionality and policy advice. The report says that Bank research is used to "proselytise on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view of the evidence" and that outside views that disagree with Bank positions are little taken into consideration - "internal research that was favourable to Bank positions was given great prominence and unfavourable research ignored".
The Bank is accused of "trumpet(ing) these early empirical results without recognising their fragile and tentative nature" and "seriously over-reaching in prematurely putting its globalization, aid and poverty publications on a pedestal". Arguments frequently used by the Bank that "aid is most effective in countries with good policies" and "growth is good for the poor" were found to be based on unreliable results. The report says that "in some cases, where groups are almost entirely inward looking, the degree of self-reference rises almost to the level of parody". (World Bank, September 2006)
This new report seriously calls into question the credibility of the Bank as the "Knowledge Bank" and provides significant support to civil society campaigns against ideologically based conditionality and policy advice. The report says that Bank research is used to "proselytise on behalf of Bank policy, often without taking a balanced view of the evidence" and that outside views that disagree with Bank positions are little taken into consideration - "internal research that was favourable to Bank positions was given great prominence and unfavourable research ignored".
The Bank is accused of "trumpet(ing) these early empirical results without recognising their fragile and tentative nature" and "seriously over-reaching in prematurely putting its globalization, aid and poverty publications on a pedestal". Arguments frequently used by the Bank that "aid is most effective in countries with good policies" and "growth is good for the poor" were found to be based on unreliable results. The report says that "in some cases, where groups are almost entirely inward looking, the degree of self-reference rises almost to the level of parody". (World Bank, September 2006)
Whistling in the dark: Why the World Bank's latest poverty
projections are meaningless
This artilce finds the World Bank's latest annual Global Economic Prospects report, which sets out the Bank's vision of the global economy until 2030, including its latest projections for poverty, meaningless and plain wrong. On of the reasons is that the World Bank fails to factor in the effects of climate change into the poverty projections. (David Woodward, Jubilee Research at the New Economics Foundation, January 2007)
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