From the article:
From an outside perspective, it certainly looks as if the World Bank is an institution in need of great change. And the problem goes far beyond poor communication.
First of all, the Bank’s original mission -- to lend money to developing countries -- is becoming less and less important. As Center for Global Development researchers Scott Morris and Madeleine Gleave noted in a 2015 report, the rapid growth of the world economy means that most countries just don’t need the bank anymore:
The Bank will continue to play an essential role in a relatively small number of fragile states, but the rest of its core lending model could very quickly become irrelevant to most of its other current borrowers…On its current path, the World Bank will soon enough be viewed as no longer essential.
Morris and Gleave suggest a number of other roles the Bank could step into, including disease response, funding scientific research, making municipal loans or simply acting as a think tank. But this isn’t very encouraging -- it paints the picture of an organization shambling onward out of sheer momentum, an expensive bureaucracy looking for a purpose. In 2014, the Financial Times wondered openly if the Bank was “sliding into irrelevance.”
Read full article here.
