The Organizational Dynamics of Adjustment Lending

The Globalizers: The IMF, the World Bank and Their Borrowers. By Ngaire Woods. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 264 pp., $29.95 (ISBN: 0-8014-4424-1). Perhaps mirroring public debate on the issue, scholarship on the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in economic development has often treated these institutions as mere conduits of US interests. In The Globalizers , Ngaire Woods seeks to amend this perception, offering a rich account of their activities that emphasizes the inner workings of these institutions and their negotiations with policymakers in developing countries. As such, The Globalizers provides a valuable inside look at the processes that shape the IMF and World Bank's role in the global economy. The Globalizers explains the design and implementation of conditional lending agreements by the IMF and the World Bank. In the design phase, pressures from powerful member governments are mediated through these two organizations, whose staffs work under bureaucratic incentive structures favoring uniform and simple solutions. “Sympathetic interlocutors” within the borrowing government give the lending institutions willing partners in negotiations over the terms of their loans (that is, the conditionality terms). These technocrats possess the policy competence to understand the necessary reforms. They also have the ideological commitment to enact the reforms and the bureaucratic autonomy to avoid competing demands from domestic interests. Thus, if the borrowers follow through on their commitments, the success of the program depends on external …