McNamara's World Bank
Article Summary and Author Biography
On March 31 of this year, Robert McNamara completed the first five years of his ten-year term as President of the World Bank Group. He has almost doubled in real terms the volume of lending by the Bank Group. He has more than doubled the size of the professional staff. He has changed the administrative structure. He has improved the relations of the Bank Group with the other international and national aid agencies. He has given the developing member-countries significant new help in their efforts to reduce their birth rates and to reconcile economic growth with the protection of their environment. He has set new criteria for lending.
McNAMARA'S WORLD BANK
On March 31 of this year, Robert McNamara completed the first five years of his ten-year term as President of the World Bank Group. He has almost doubled in real terms the volume of lending by the Bank Group. He has more than doubled the size of the professional staff. He has changed the administrative structure. He has improved the relations of the Bank Group with the other international and national aid agencies. He has given the developing member-countries significant new help in their efforts to reduce their birth rates and to reconcile economic growth with the protection of their environment. He has set new criteria for lending.
He had been President for only a year and a half when he began to advocate new criteria for lending, new qualitative goals for the operations of the Bank Group. His argument ran, and runs, as follows: "Economic growth in a poor country, in its early stages, is likely to penalize the poorer segment of society relative to the more affluent sections . . . [unless poor countries] relate the goals of national growth to realistic targets of more equitable income distribution." A period of rapid economic growth, accompanied by great unemployment, by an increase in the disparities between regions and classes and by a continued growth of urban slums, may well create such political and social tensions that the period of rapid economic growth will be followed by a period of no growth or even of retrogression. A development policy which takes properly into account the need to reduce unemployment and to improve the conditions of the poor may result in a slower rate of growth of the economy in the short term but in a faster rate over the long term. "When the highly privileged [in a developing country] are few and the desperately poor are many-and when the gap between them is worsening rather than improving-it is only a question of time before a decisive choice must be made between the political costs of reform and the political risks of rebellion."
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