The World Bank

The World Bank
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Founded	July 1944

The World Bank is a neoliberal financial institution headquartered in Washington, D.C. It exists to serve the interests of Western countries and its leaders are usually U.S. citizens that are supported by the U.S. Congress. Five major industrial countries have more voting power in the World Bank than almost 100 Third World countries, and the USA alone controls 20% of votes.

The stated purpose of the World Bank is to "reduce poverty and increase shared prosperity" through "financing, policy advice, and technical assistance" to governments, and also focuses on strengthening the private sector in developing countries. However, as historian and political scientist Eric Toussaint asserts, the unstated agenda of the World Bank is to "subordinate the public and private spheres of all human societies to the capitalist imperative of seeking maximum profit" which results in stagnation and deterioration of the living conditions of a great majority of the world’s population, concurrently with greater and greater concentration of wealth, as well as contributing to the deterioration of the natural environment.

In 2015, a UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty called the World Bank "a human rights-free zone" and said that in its operational policies, the World Bank "treats human rights more like an infectious disease than universal values and obligations."

Countries must also join the International Monetary Fund to be eligible to join the World Bank Group.

History

The World Bank was founded at the end of the Second World War and initially loaned money to Western European governments.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the World Bank systematically granted loans to colonial powers and their colonies for projects that increased exploitation of natural resources and of peoples for the benefit of the ruling classes in the colonizer countries. The World Bank refused to apply a United Nations resolution adopted in 1965 calling on it to refrain from supporting Portugal financially and technically until the country’s government abandoned its colonialist policies. The debts contracted with the World Bank on decision of the colonial powers, Belgium, Britain and France, in their African colonies, were subsequently imposed on the new countries at the time of their achieving independence.

In the 1960s and '70s, it supported the industrialization of agriculture in Third World countries.

In 1991, the World Bank encouraged moving industries that cause high amounts of pollution to Third World countries.