World Bank

WORLD BANK :  The World Bank is an international organisation dedicated to providing financing, advice and research to developing nations to aid their economic advancement. The World Bank was created out of the Bretton Woods agreement as a result of many European and Asian countries needing financing to fund reconstruction efforts. As of 2016, the Bank predominantly acts as an organisation that attempts to nght poverty by offering developmental assistance to middle- and poor-income countries.

Structure: The World Bank has expanded from the single institution that was created in 1944 to a group of five unique and cooperative institutional organisations.

Purpose and Function: The World Bank provides low-interest loans, interest-free credit and grants. It focuses on improving education, health and infrastructure. It also uses funds to modernise a country's financial sector, agriculture and natural resources management. The Bank's stated purpose is to "bridge the economic divide between poor and rich countries." It does this by turning "rich country resources into poor country growth." It has a long-term vision to "achieve sustainable poverty reduction."

To achieve this goal, the Bank focuses on six areas:

Leadership:  The President of the Bank is the president of the entire World Bank Group. The president, currently Jim Yong Kim, is responsible for chairing the meetings of the Boards of Directors and for overall management of the Bank. Traditionally, the President of the Bank has always been a US citizen nominated by the United States, the largest shareholder in the bank (the managing director of the International Monetary Fund having always becn a European). The nominee is subject to confirmation by the Board of Executive Directors to serve for a five-year , renewable term.The Board of Directors consists of the World Bank Group President and 25 Executive Directors."President is the presiding officer, and ordinarily has no vote except a deciding vote in case of an equal division. The Executive Directors as individuals cannot exercise any power nor commit or represent the Directors, to serve for a five-year, renewable term. Bank unless specifically authorised by the Board to do so.

Bretton Woods Institutions:  The Bretton Woods institutions were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944 during the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel. At the conference, member nations agreed to create a family of institutions to address critical issues in the international financial system. The Bretton Woods Institutions are the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their aims were to help rebuild the shattered post-war economy and to promote international economic cooperation. The original Bretton Woods agreement also included plans for an International Trade Organisation (ITO) but these lay dormant until the World Trade Organisation (WTo) was created in the early 1990s. The creation of the World Bank and the IMF came at the end of the Second World War.

The World Bank:  Originally created primarily to finance the reconstruction of war-torn Europe, the World Bank has become the primary financier of development projects in the Third World. It has also become the Third World's largest creditor. The World Bank is currently the largest multi-national lending and technical agency dealing with Third World development. As the world's leading development agency, the World Bank has a wide-ranging mandate, from consolidating loans for large-scale development projects to providing structural adjustment loans and sectoral adjustment loans to developing countries experiencing balance of payments problems.

In the 1970s, under the presidency of Robert McNamara, the World Bank grew dramatically in size and  scope. In the 198os, in large part owing to the debt crisis, the Bank increasingly served as a debt- management institution, lending in some cases as much as 50% of a developing country's portfolio toward structural and/or sectoral adjustment lending. The primary feature of this kind of lending was to restore a troubled economy's debt servicing capacity by urging indebted countries to adopt major economic forms known as structural adjustment programmes (SAPS).