"It would be a demotion in the Bank to be called an economist [...] and death for a career." 

– Irving S. Friedman, Economic Adviser to the President of the World Bank, 1964–1970

Development Brokers: The World Bank, Economic Expertise, and Global Governance

This book uncovers how a small and largely forgotten cohort of economists transformed the World Bank from a cautious lender into one of the foundational institutions of the world economy with a noteworthy influence on the theory and practice of international development. Operating at the crossroads of Cold War rivalries, rapid decolonization, and the intensifying global North-South divide, these economists recast long-held views and brought the Bank to the center of the global development debates. In the process, they helped to institutionalize the language of economics as the lingua franca not only at the World Bank, but in international development discourse.

Development Brokers reconstructs the ambitious visions Bank economists elaborated for economic development and multilateral governance. It also reveals a striking historical irony: the foundations of the Bank’s economic expertise in the 1960s were dramatically different from the trajectory the institution would later follow. During this decade, Bank economists frequently aligned themselves with perspectives found in other international organizations – including those often portrayed as the Bank’s competitors – pushing the institution toward unexpectedly progressive positions. 

They advanced ideas such as commodity-price stabilization, new approaches to estimating capital requirements and allocating concessional funds, and early forms of policy conditionality that would diverge sharply from the strategies later adopted across the global development landscape. In this sense, Development Brokers offers a major reinterpretation of the political economy of the World Bank, which complicates schematic classifications of the international institutional architecture of the twentieth century. It brings new perspectives on the evolution of development thinking and lending, the politics of expertise, and the historical role of multilateral institutions in shaping and managing the world economy.

Archives consulted for Development Brokers:

American Heritage Center (Laramie, Wyoming, USA)

Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts, University of Oxford (Oxford, UK)

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

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

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)