ABSTRACT
The great hope held out by the ‘new’ development finance institutions of the 1980s was that they might kill several birds with one stone: achieve financial self-sufficiency, increase incomes and employment and reduce poverty through one and the same set of design features. Through Chapters 3 to 5 we now have some insight into how well our group of institutions achieved each of these separate objectives, and through the following two chapters we know something of the influence of political and management factors on such achievement. What now has to be established is the extent to which success in one direction prejudiced success in another. Did success in financial terms require a price to be paid in terms of poverty reduction, and if so, what was that price; did it vary as between countries and their politico-economic environments; and can the price be reduced by appropriate sleights of institutional design? These are the questions to be tackled in this chapter.
