05 Apr The World Bank as Defender of a Free Press, the Environment, Peace, Justice, etc.
The World Bank used to resist calls to use its loans as instruments of domestic legal reform, but that resistance has fallen away in recent years during the Bank’s campaign against domestic corruption. This IHT op-ed argues that the World Bank’s anti-corruption policies should extend to loan conditions mandating the protection of a free press in the country of a loan recipient. This seems fairly uncontroversial, except that it might swamp the Bank with lots of monitoring costs or open the door to imposing other “political” mandates not directly related to its economic development mission (See the World Bank’s Articles of Association Article 3 Section 5):
(b) The Bank shall make arrangements to ensure that the proceeds of any loan are used only for the purposes for which the loan was granted, with due attention to considerations of economy and efficiency and without regard to political or other non-economic influences or considerations.
(emphasis added)
Notwithstanding this language, I actually think political and other non-economic loan conditions are justifiable. The Bank is essentially owned by the largest economic powers who put in the money, so those powers should feel free to throw their weight around in a way that they can’t in other organizations premised on state equality. Countries don’t have to take their World Bank’s loans, so the coercion factor is less serious.
On the other hand, the goal of the World Bank is to improve economic development. It might prove the case that suppressing press freedom is actually conducive to development (this is highly unlikely but possible in some cases see, e.g., China). So the Bank should also have the policy discretion to go the other way as well.
‘It might prove the case that suppressing press freedom is actually conducive to development….’ Well, I suppose that all depends on how one chooses to define economic development. I prefer, with the economist Amartya Sen, to understand development ‘as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy.’ Indeed, ‘viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development important, rather than merely to some of the means that, inter alia, play a prominent part on the process.’ Please see Sen’s important work, Development as Freedom (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1999). I won’t attempt here to summarize Sen’s argument, so suffice to say his expertise and impeccable standing among his colleagues in the profession earn his exposition serious consideration. In the words of Kenneth Arrow, ‘[Sen] develops elegantly, compactly, and yet broadly the concept that economic development is in its nature an increase of freedom. By historical examples, empirical evidence, and forceful and rigorous analysis, he shows how development, broadly and properly conceived, cannot be antagonistic to liberty but consists precisely in its increase.’ The parenthetical reference to China as a possible instance in which ‘suppressing press freedom is actually conducive to… Read more »
Erratum and addendum respectively: ‘play a prominent part in the process,’
and
’emphasis added’ in the parenthetical statement,’when thirty million people died’…