Source: ft.com
The World Bank has increased its support for anti-corruption efforts in poor countries, but needs a more comprehensive approach to help their governments improve, says the financial institution’s watchdog.
A report from the Independent Evaluation Group, which monitors the bank’s performance, said an anti-corruption strategy launched in 2007 had focused mainly on the bank’s own processes and had yet to show many tangible results.
Case studies of six countries with governance problems – Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Guatemala, Liberia and Moldova – showed that the bank’s “record in helping to achieve countrywide governance improvements was limited”, said the report.
Navin Girishankar, its lead author, said the bank needed to focus on all aspects of public sector governance, including public finances, civil service reform and anti-corruption agencies.
“The challenge is a broad one – to help in building the core institutions of the state,” he said.
The bank’s commitment to fight corruption also clashed with the pressures on bank staff to get grants and loan money out of the door, the report argued.
The financial institution’s management welcomed some of the report’s suggestions, but said it ignored much of the work the bank had been doing on governance, and argued that it was too optimistic to expect rapid observable results in deep-seated problems such as corruption.
“There are few quick fixes in this work and many competing pressures,” the management said in a response published alongside the report.
Implementation of the governance initiative “was designed as a change management strategy that sought to strengthen staff awareness and capacity, build tools and generate good practice in selected areas”, said the bank’s management.
Corruption both within the bank’s own projects and within its borrower governments has emerged as one of the most high-profile and controversial aspects of the organisation’s work. Many developing countries regard it as interfering with their sovereign authority.
The report said the bank needed to do more systematic and high-profile work on the political economy of its client countries, which would identify likely sources of corruption.
“The bank has a propensity to do standalone analyses of political economy that few people inside the country know about,” said Mr Girishankar.
Paul Wolfowitz, the bank’s former president, launched a drive to eliminate corruption in bank-supported projects – the conduct of which put him at loggerheads with some of the bank’s shareholder countries.
A commission headed by Paul Volcker, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, concluded in 2007 that the bank was too lax on graft.
Wednesday’s report did not review the bank’s internal reorganisation since Mr Volcker’s report, nor the strengthening of its operations to investigate corporate corruption and impose sanctions – an omission criticised by the bank’s management.
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