"[I]t would be a demotion in the Bank to be called an economist [...] and death for a career." – Irving S. Friedman

In my doctoral research, I study the construction of economic knowledge at the World Bank in the 1960s, during the so-called Decade of Development. By relying on newly declassified, confidential, and previously untapped records from multiple archives (see below), I aim to untangle the complexities of the rise of economists as policy advisors at the Bank as part of the larger process of the institutionalization of economics in post-World War II global institutional architecture.

I analyze the micro-dynamics within the Bank by reconstructing the internal debates among the individuals who worked at the organization. In my story, staff members have a voice; not the voice of a homogenous group labeled “staff” or an analytical category or a specific structure in the organization. The voice of international civil servants is that of living and thinking human beings, who are not expected to and do not simply follow incentives, rules and norms all the time (if at all). At the same time, they are not marionettes worked from above by states, top management or – to borrow a phrase from David Carpenter – sloppy amalgams such as Wall Street or global capital. From this perspective, the World Bank emerges as a complex environment, which is not always – or hardly ever – inherently consistent; a flotilla rather than a vessel, never easily moving in unison. 

My story begins with the rising concerns about international indebtedness in the late 1950s, which contributed to the establishment of the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank’s soft-loan facility, in 1960. In the attempt to prevent a similar institution emerging under the auspices of the United Nations, IDA was set up in a way that would not radically alter the modus operandi of the Bank, which at that time followed a conservative approach to lending and financed primarily large-scale infrastructure and energy projects.

George D. Woods, who became the World Bank's fourth President in 1963, brought IDA into the spotlight by arguing that it was supposed to gain a more prominent role in the World Bank Group (at that time comprising the original International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, IBRD; the International Finance Corporation, IFC; and IDA). The vision of an enlarged and strengthened IDA led to a rapid revitalization of the World Bank’s Economics Department (led by Andrew M. Kamarck) and ascendance of economic analysis undertaken at the Bank (led by Irving S. Friedman, the Economic Advisor to the President). While in the early 1960s the Bank employed only a handful of economists, who, it must be said, did not enjoy much recognition in an environment dominated by bankers and technical engineers, the Economics Department hired over 200 economists between 1964 and 1968, which increased the size of the Bank by 25% and in the process raised the status of economists as well.

The revitalized Economics Department quickly became one of the engines of innovative thinking on development issues at the Bank and one of the leading global intellectual centers in the international development field. The economists advocated for a massive enlargement of concessional funds provision for international development projects, which were to be channeled through IDA. They devised criteria of concessional funds allocation and debated the methods of assessing the economic performance of developing countries. They attempted to bring the World Bank to the center of the international commodity problem by collaborating with agencies such as the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the International Coffee Organization (ICO). They also explored the possibility of linking policy conditions to the Bank’s financial assistance – a type of lending that would be reintroduced at the Bank more than a decade later with the advent of structural adjustment loans.

In short, my doctoral research aims to tell the story of how a group of economists – Irving S. Friedman, Andrew M. Kamarck, Dragoslav Avramovic, Alexander Stevenson, Barend de Vries, John Adler, Béla Balassa, Guy H. Orcutt, and many others – transformed the World Bank in the 1960s. They did it by constructing economic knowledge and, more importantly, a particular development vision for the organization, which they hoped to link to the Bank's financial operations and thus revolutionize its lending. My research shows what they achieved, how they shaped the broader development discourse together with the global institutional architecture of international development – and why they ultimately failed.

ARCHIVES CONSULTED FOR MY RESEARCH PROJECT:

American Heritage Center (Laramie, Wyoming, USA)

Bank of France (Paris, France)

Caltech Archives and Special Collections (Pasadena, California, USA)

Columbia University Archives (New York City, New York, USA)

Economists’ Papers Archive (Durham, North Carolina, USA)

Harvard University Archives (Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA)

Hoover Institution Library &  Archives (Stanford, California, USA)

IMF Archives (Washington, D.C., USA)

International Coffee Organization (London, UK)

JFK Presidential Library (Boston, Massachusetts, USA)

LBJ Presidential Library (Austin, Texas, USA)

Library of Congress (Washington, D.C., USA)

United Nations Archives (New York City, New York, USA)

US National Archives (College Park, Maryland, USA)

World Bank Group Archives (Washington, D.C., USA)