Normally, when two Washington bulwarks spend more than USD 2 million for an authorised history, publication is marked by a bang, not a whimper. That´s why people in the economic development field are scratching their heads over the reception of The World Bank: Its First Half Century, a two-volume history authorised by the bank, published by the Brookings Institution and underwritten by both. To say that the 2,000 page tome has been greeted with reticence by the bank doesn´t quite capture its not-so-benign neglect.
The World Bank still has a vast mandate and considerable influence, even though anti-Communism – the primary geopolitical impulse for US participation – has evaporated, and the bank´s net annual lending of USD 7.4 billion represents only 2 to 3 percent of the total flow of capital to developing countries. Simply put, the bank is to economic development theology what the papacy is to Catholicism, complete with yearly encyclicals. The bank, with its 5,400 full-time employees, still leads and other lenders or donors follow. It is particularly instrumental in orienting officials and politicians in poorer countries to economic development, World Bank-style.
The authors´ integrity may have everything to do with the bank´s neglect of the book, a standoffishness so marked that it suggests bank management surreptitiously hopes the history will go unread. (Brookings, very much the junior partner in underwriting the project, has promoted it through its usual channels.) There was an early consensus that at least one of the principal historians ought to hail from the world the bank is ostensibly dedicated to improving. So in addition to John Lewis, former dean of the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton, a "South" economist, Richard Webb, was recruited. Webb, a Peruvian, is an expert on income distribution.
Webb took the writing of the bank´s history very seriously. He had been invested with a great public trust – to write an enduring account of a highly influential international institution during the second half of the twentieth century – and he proceeded accordingly. Together with an Indian national, Devesh Kapur, whose indis pensability caused him to be promoted to full co-authorship, Webbwent about the job thoroughly, combing the bank´s archives for internal memorandums and transcripts of meetings, even seeking out the private papers of retired bank officers.