<b>Interests in conflict</b>
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<b>Interests in conflict</b>

Headline: Interests in conflict
Source: Euromoney
Date: September 2001

       
Ian Vasquez
World Bank president James Wolfensohn has spent an unprecedented amount of time and energy reaching out to civil society. The Bank’s management, however, now faces a difficult, if not impossible balancing act as a result.

Shankar Acharya, a Harvard-trained economist who recently served for eight years as chief economic adviser to India’s finance ministry, puts it this way: “It’s my sense that the World Bank is trying too much to be all things to all people. It has become driven by too many objectives, over the past half dozen years or so. The Bank would be more effective if it was more focused on key development objectives rather than on getting into every passing fad.”

Still, Acharya believes that the Bank’s contribution to development in India generally has been positive. “Both the World Bank and the IDA have played a very important role with financial assistance to India’s development programme,” he says. But Acharya admits that external assistance is a fairly small part of India’s total investment effort. He points out that it has been an important supplement to domestic savings and brings special features: to wit, world-class practices in infrastructure projects and other sectors as well as the discipline of international competitive bidding on all Bank projects.







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