Finance & economics | Reforming the World Bank

Zen and the art of poverty reduction

Calm and confusion at the world’s biggest development institution

Take me to your infrastructure practice

THE World Bank may need a period of quiet reflection, but this was ridiculous. On September 10th 300 bankers joined Thich Nhat Hanh, an 87-year-old Vietnamese monk and founder of the Order of Interbeing, for a day of “mindful meditation” with Jim Kim, the bank’s president and an admirer of Mr Hanh. “It was all very Zen,” one member of staff told the Washington Post. Afterwards, Mr Hanh and 20 brown-robed brethren led a “walking meditation” through Washington—though since the traffic police did not show up, the quiet contemplation was marred by the not-so-Zen honking of angry drivers.

Mr Hanh says he believes in “the power of aimlessness” and thinks civilisation is threatened by “voracious” economic growth. Mr Kim (one hopes) does not. He is trying to give the bank a sharper focus. In the unlovely words of a new strategy, endorsed by the bank’s governors on October 12th, the group’s “value proposition” is to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to foster income growth among the poorest 40% in every country, not just poor ones. The aim is to shake up the world’s leading development body.

Since it began, the World Bank has run almost 12,000 projects in 172 countries. But voracious economic growth in the past 25 years has meant that the bank’s lending has fallen to less than 1% of the combined economic output of the borrowers. As more nations graduate to middle-income status and win access to capital markets for big development projects, fewer of them need the money and expertise the bank has to offer.

Having a target for eradicating poverty aims to finesse this. Extreme poverty is a global problem and would justify a global institution devoted to ending it. One billion people live on less than $1.25 a day (the bank’s definition of penury), most of them in what the bank calls middle-income countries such as India and Brazil. The bottom 40% includes a further 1.5 billion people. So carving out a role in poverty eradication would make the bank relevant to middle-income countries even though their governments might not need its money any more and might think the bank has little to offer their growing middle classes.

How much difference the new strategy will make from day to day, though, is open to question. The bank is already supposed to be helping the poorest; the new goal marks only a shift in emphasis and, on the face of it, will not stop it doing most of what it is doing now. The aim of eradicating extreme poverty by 2030 is not overly ambitious. Recent data suggest the income of the bottom 40% has been growing as fast as, or faster than, the national average in most developing countries for 25 years.

So does the new approach matter? The rhetorical change probably does not, but the reorganisation which accompanies it might. For years, the World Bank has been organised along geographic lines (South Asia, Africa and so on). The regions control the budgets, hire the staff and dominate the bank. They are also responsible for its reputation for being divided into silos: experts from different regions rarely talk to each other. In an attempt to break this pattern, the bank is setting up 14 “global practices” (such as finance and infrastructure) which will cut across the regions.

The bank has also long been accused of doing too much. It runs a tiger-conservation project, for instance. To provide clearer priorities, the plan proposes a new method for deciding what countries need. The idea is to diagnose the worst constraints on poverty reduction and focus mainly on those. When the bank ran a pilot “country diagnostic” for India, it found it needed to concentrate more of its efforts in the six poorest states.

The bank has a history, however, of grandiose reorganisations. One comes along every decade. They rarely achieve much. There are several reasons why this shake-up might be no different.

Diagnosing constraints sounds like an excellent idea. But it turns out that no sooner have you identified one supposedly crucial obstacle than another appears behind it. The model might not always give the clear guidance that it did for India.

Neither is it certain whether the “global practices” are intended to be more important than the regional units, or whether the two are supposed to be evenly balanced, and if so, how. Setting up global practices also risks turning the bank into a glorified McKinsey in which experts jet in to advise on a big project and jet out—a tendency for which development agencies are already rightly criticised.

Then there are doubts about Mr Kim himself. He has had a wobbly start since being foisted on the bank by the American government last year. After winning over many at first, he found himself under attack this summer when senior people began leaving in a huff, or were fired, as the reorganisation took shape. The grumbling has since died down, but confidence among employees looks shaky.

And what if the plan succeeds? Then the institution would face a different problem. If it is all about reducing poverty and extreme poverty is eradicated by 2030, what role would be left to it then? No doubt it will think of something.

Correction: We originally wrote that the World Bank has 12,000 projects in 172 countries. This was wrong. It has about 1,600 ongoing projects and its sister organisation, the International Finance Corporation, has about 2,700. Apologies. This was corrected on October 18th 2013.

This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline "Zen and the art of poverty reduction"

How science goes wrong

From the October 19th 2013 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

Explore the edition

Discover more

China’s banks have a bad-debt problem

As is becoming increasingly obvious

Which country will be last to escape inflation?

A new dividing line in the global fight


How the “Magnificent Seven” misleads

Forget the supergroup of stockmarket darlings