Since the early 1990s, the World Bank and Inter‐American Development Bank have led efforts advocating the use of economic tools in setting priorities for health spending in poor countries. But while ...these powerful global health institutions present economic management as the key to improving health, they often fail to implement even their own policies requiring the use of economic tools for health project planning. In these institutions, economic tools operate beyond application for decision‐making, becoming simultaneously a site of tensions regarding sovereignty and sites of enjoyment for economists at development bank headquarters. This article traces the ways that economic tools are both deployed and left aside across development bank networks, and in the process are productive of both affect and power. Attention to frictions in the use of economic tools ought to help motivate more just global health governance, taking into account political considerations that are built into expert practice.
This paper proposes two theoretical considerations regarding Multilateral development banks (MDBs). The first is that MDB activities are increasingly driven by the growing economic strength of many ...developing countries. The second is that categorizing MDBs according to the balance of power among shareholders helps explain why countries might prefer one or another MDB. We compare three different MDBs operating in Latin America—one dominated by nonborrowers (World Bank), another controlled by borrowing countries (Andean Development Corporation, CAF), and a third more evenly split between borrowers and nonborrowers (Inter-American Development Bank, IADB). Qualitative and statistical analysis suggests that demand factors play an important role in MDB lending.
This research proposes, as a general objective, to analyze the relations between the Federal Government and the federated entities in the formation of the Brazilian foreign policy for the Amazonian ...question. To this end, it is developed a quantitative and qualitative study of the investments made by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in subnational entities in the Legal Amazon within the context of the policies of Federative Diplomacy and International Federative Cooperation of Brazilian foreign policy. Thus, the article has as a central problem if the subnational dimension of the federated entities of the Legal Amazon was strengthened through the IDB's investments in the region in environmental issues. The methodological aspects are traced from the approach of institutional analysis of subnational engagement policies. In addition, the analysis of the IDB's investments is carried out by primary sources, in addition to a bibliographic review on two debates on Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), the pluralization of actors, and the character of public policies on foreign policy. In summary, the results of the research point to the central role of the Federal Government's federal relations policies in strengthening the states of the Legal Amazon in their international actions and the search for investments.
This article presents a global database of government contracts funded by the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and EuropeAid, principally from the years 2000-2017. The contract-level data ...were directly collected from the official contract publication sites of these organisations using webscraping methods. While the source publication formats are diverse both over time and across publishers, we standardized and harmonized the datasets so that they can be analysed jointly. The datasets contain key information on the contracting parties (e.g. buyer and supplier names) the contract's content (e.g. contract value and product description) and details of the contracting process (e.g. contract award date or the procedure followed). In addition, it also contains information on the development aid projects of the contracts (e.g. project title and value). The data has wide reuse potential for researchers looking for detailed micro-level information on how major development aid spending takes place and what impacts it has. This database underlies the research article “Anti-corruption in aid-funded procurement: Is corruption reduced or merely displaced?” 1 which develops corruption risk indicators using the dataset presented.
From the reports of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Office of Evaluation and Oversight (OVE), a limited analysis of the factors affecting the execution of development cooperation projects ...was identified. Thanks to the review of scientific articles by renowned authors, effectiveness, relevance, competencies and motivation, sustainability, risk management, and additionality were evaluated using the analysis of relationships between variables and causality using IBM SPSS and fsQCA 3.0 software, respectively. As a result, a model was obtained that relates the components, factors, and roles that make up the stakeholder matrix. It was concluded that the effectiveness factor has a significant relationship with the success of a project; however, this could not be possible without a good development of sustainability and risk management, the latter being a necessary and sufficient condition for success in this type of projects. Currently, risk management has not only become a necessity nowadays, but the improvement of risk management will increase sustainability in project management, the main factors for the success of a project.
Do quality-at-entry assessments enhance the delivery of development projects? In this paper we take advantage of approval and execution systems in place at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) ...to examine whether projects that have higher quality-at-entry - captured through grading scores provided by a checklist - perform better in terms of project implementation performance indicators. Implementation indicators include measures based on actual versus planned schedule of activities and cost outlays, as well as per cent of loan disbursed. The analysis suggests higher scores on project logic and economic analyses at entry have had a positive impact on project performance. However, monitoring and impact assessment scores had limited impacts on performance. The evidence supports the hypothesis that the use of a checklist can be an effective framework for assessing quality-at-entry for IDB projects, though there is scope to improve the checklist for certain indicators.
Latin America underwent two major transformations during the 2000s: the widespread election of left-leaning presidents (the so-called left turn) and the diffusion of conditional cash transfer ...programs (CCTs)—innovative social programs that award regular stipends to poor families on the condition that their children attend school. Combining cross-national quantitative research covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research, Human Capital versus Basic Income: Ideology and Models for Anti-Poverty Programs in Latin America challenges the conventional wisdom that these two transformations were unrelated. In this book, author Fabián A. Borges demonstrates that this ideology greatly influenced both the adoption and design of CCTs. There were two distinct models of CCTs: a “human capital” model based on means-tested targeting and strict enforcement of program conditions, exemplified by the program launched by Mexico’s right, and a more universalistic “basic income” model with more permissive enforcement of conditionality, exemplified by Brazil’s program under Lula. These two models then spread across the region. Whereas right and center governments, with assistance from international financial institutions, enacted CCTs based on the human capital model, the left, with assistance from Brazil, enacted CCTs based on the basic income model. The existence of two distinct types of CCTs and their relation to ideology is supported by quantitative analyses covering the entire region and in-depth case studies based on field research in three countries. Left-wing governments operate CCTs that cover more people and spend more on those programs than their center or right-wing counterparts. Beyond coverage, a subsequent analysis of the 10 national programs adopted after Lula’s embrace of CCTs confirms that program design—evaluated in terms of scope of the target population, strictness of conditionality enforcement, and stipend structure—is shaped by government ideology. This finding is then fleshed out through case studies of the political processes that culminated in the adoption of basic income CCTs by left-wing governments in Argentina and Bolivia and a human capital CCT by a centrist president in Costa Rica.
In 1993, the World Bank created its Inspection Panel, unprecedently opening itself up to being held to account by people negatively affected by its development projects. Within a decade, the other ...Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) - the Asian, African, Inter-American Development Banks, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the rest of the World Bank Group would too. The creation of these accountability mechanisms embodies a norm of 'accountability as justice' that provides recourse for damaging behaviour through a formal sanctioning process. This article makes two arguments: first, the United States built on its history of using 'accountability as control' to advocate using accountability for justice for the MDBs during debates over maintaining their efficiency and effectiveness. As the predominant MDB shareholder, the United States used its power (of the purse) and influence (through its voice and vote) to garner support for the norm despite opposition from borrowers and the Banks. Second, the United States had to resort to these same levers to demand the MDBs reformulate the mechanisms when borrower resistance and Bank avoidance hindered their effectiveness. The United States successfully created the norm but Bank recalcitrance meant the United States had to use the same levers to ensure its effectiveness. The article concludes that change within the Banks is evident but incremental: the spread of the norm amongst the MDBs has changed their governance to include recourse for project affected people with structures in place to strengthen them over time.
A powerful and eulogistic narrative has evolved around the Venezuelan National System of Youth and Children's Orchestras, better known as El Sistema. Recently, however, critical perspectives have ...begun to emerge from the academic sphere. Nevertheless, researchers have faced an acute shortage of documentary resources relating to the programme's history. The reappearance of a collection of documents from 1996 to 97 thus represents an important development. The sources, which include four external evaluations, relate to El Sistema's efforts to secure funding from the Inter-American Development Bank. In this article, these documents are examined in chronological order and then analysed in comparative perspective. They shed light on both the history of El Sistema and polarised present-day debates about this famous organisation, corroborating recent academic studies and further questioning the dominant institutional and advocacy narrative about a socially transformative programme aimed primarily at the poor.
The United States is not alone in facing increasing incidence and prevalence of chronic conditions as a contributor to poorer health and growing health care spending. Latin America and the Caribbean ...face similar burdens, but they have fewer resources with which to respond. Much remains to be done to cope with the emerging public health and fiscal threat posed by increases in chronic conditions. However, a set of studies sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank bring good news on potentially cost-effective strategies to improve coverage and outcomes. They should help move the growing epidemic of chronic diseases in Latin America and the Caribbean to the forefront of health policy in the region.
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