ABSTRACT
The relationship between the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs), led by the World Bank (WB), and the borrowing nation-states remains the subject of considerable controversy. Critics on the left complain that the MDBs, using their conditionality clout, have involved themselves in a neoimperialist fashion in the most sensitive domestic policy arenas and threaten countries’ self-determination efforts, while critics on the right point to what they see as a lack of overall development success as an indication that development should really be left to private markets. But both sets of critics can agree – and here they are joined by the Bank itself – that the adjustment assistance era of the 1980s and 1990s has not proved highly productive.
