Eco. 362 (Online Discussion/Quiz 14-01-2022–Development in 1960s and 70s and World Bank Lending)

Name: Obodoagu Somtochukwu Lilian
Reg. No: 2018/242452
Department: Economics
Course: Eco 362
Assignment
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters
McNamara eradicate poverty in the developing countries when he led the world bank between 1973 to 1980 by initiating new program, the world bank lent large sum to facilitate rural development, urban development and development of small scale industry.Bank loans also help to developed program for the improvement of health, educational services and family planning.

McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.

From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.

One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.

McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.

He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.

Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.

McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

Name: Nwankwo chidubem pascal
Regno:2018/245467
Dept: Economics
Course Eco 362
Assignment s and answer

Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.

McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.

McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

Personal History

Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics and excelling in his studies. His personal experiences during the Great Depression and the liberal outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. He enrolled in the Harvard Business School in 1937 and it was here that he acquired the management techniques that became characteristic of his leadership style. The concept of management based on the accumulation and analysis of quantitative data appealed to his disciplined mind and provided him with a tool for exercising control in uncertain conditions.

He applied this management style in the military during World War II and in private industry (Ford Motor Company) after the war. The aggressive new management techniques earned McNamara and his colleagues the nickname “Whiz Kids.” In November 1960 McNamara was named president of Ford Motor Company. But after only one month in this position, McNamara was called to the new Kennedy administration to serve as Secretary of Defense, with a mandate to bring the military under control through the application of efficient management.

McNamara quickly became involved in the substance and politics of government administration, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson sought his advice on defense, foreign policy, and international relations. The Vietnam War claimed much of McNamara’s time and energy at the Defense Department, and over the years he began to feel that victory in this war was impossible. His thinking on the war gradually diverged from that of President Johnson, and Johnson abruptly nominated McNamara as the next World Bank president.

NAME: OKOYE ARTHUR-KINGSLEY KANAYO
REG NO: 2018/241820

The adjustments from project lending to program lending – Reflections of the World’s bank shift to Growth equality.
Some time in the 1960s , the strategy (the trickle-down) approach was observed by policy makers to not have carried along or ameliorated the status of the poor. In-fact, some believed that it worsened as time went on.
Due to the very conspicuous maldistribution of income , the government and the world bank came into cooperation to establish mechanisms and social programs that was intended to directly address poverty. These programs were aimed at improving education, health, housing, transportation, water etc. The world bank had a handful of significant actors through its existence, one of which is Robert McNamara, whom led and agitated for the social welfare of developing countries.
In his view, it was a commendable move/action (in the scenario of the cold war) to work with the government to eradicate absolute poverty in the developing states with financial, technical and advisory aid from the world bank and already Developed nations at the light of the cold war. These unfolding events led to Governments of developing countries to engage in State -run programs aimed at improving the lot of it’s respective citizens.
The ‘growth with equity’ approach was evident in the new types of programs that were implemented at the world bank. Although, project lending aimed at the development of infrastructures – the industrial and agricultural activities were persistent as this was an already established means of survival. The programs implemented by Robert McNamara were emphatically directed at Eradication of abject poverty, thus inducing the world bank to engage in lending of large sums to facilitate urban development, development of small-scale industries and intentional rural development.
Bank loans played a significant role by implementing programs which aimed at Improvement of health, nutrition, family planning and educational services.
The major objective of these programs was to cater for the impoverished and underemployed sectors of the population in varying countries.

NAME: NWEKE MELODY CHIOMA
CLASS:300 LEVEL
DEPARTMENT:ECONOMICS
REG NO:2018/243742
ASSIGNMENT
DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
The change to program lending reflected the world banks shift to ‘GROWTH WITH EQUITY’.
    In the 1960s, many policy makers realized that the formulated policies aimed at development in the developing world was not improving the circumstances of the poor.
   Some believed that accurate policies should be established and geared towards the execution of ‘GROWTH WITH EQUITY’. Due to the openly obvious misdistribution of wealth, the world bank in conjunction with the governments of the developing world established the social programs intended to address issues of poverty. Some of the programs includes:
·        Public safety
·        Health
·        Education
·        Infrastructure
Transportation etc
  All these measures to alleviate poverty in the developing world was in the light if the cold war. With financial and technical assistance, the world bank and the governments of the developing world implemented the programs aimed at ‘GROWTH WITH EQUITY’.
  Although, project lending towards Infrastructure, agriculture and industry till continued, policies on rural and urban development wore introduced to alleviate poverty.  
 
 

NAME: CHINWUBA IFEANYI INNOCENT.
CLASS:300 LEVEL
DEPARTMENT:ECONOMICS
REG NO:2018/242447
ASSIGNMENT
DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1960S AND 1970S
The change to program lending reflected the world banks shift to ‘GROWTH WITH EQUITY’.
In the 1960s, many policy makers realized that the formulated policies aimed at development in the developing world was not improving the circumstances of the poor.
Some believed that accurate policies should be established and geared towards the execution of ‘GROWTH WITH EQUITY’. Due to the openly obvious misdistribution of wealth, the world bank in conjunction with the governments of the developing world established the social programs intended to address issues of poverty. Some of the programs includes:
• Public safety
• Health
• Education
• Infrastructure
Transportation etc
All these measures to alleviate poverty in the developing world was in the light if the cold war. With financial and technical assistance, the world bank and the governments of the developing world implemented the programs aimed at ‘GROWTH WITH EQUITY’.
Although, project lending towards Infrastructure, agriculture and industry till continued, policies on rural and urban development wore introduced to alleviate poverty.

Nnamani Dorathy nchido
Economic
2018/245743
Assignment on 362
RURAL DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
Governments of the developing world were called to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. As time went on, despite countries’ positive annual growth, malnutrition persisted, infant mortality remained high, life expectancy was low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment soared, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.
The Integrated rural development (IRD) approach thus became the prototype for this assistance. These programs grew out of this original excitement of development practitioners, which hoped to transform undeveloped rural settings into cohesive communities, with profitable productive opportunities, and where members could enjoy basic public and social services. While rural development programs went on to benefit millions, rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best, indirectly. As many studies have attested, IRD projects achieved disappointing results. Some projects failed due to serious Institutional weaknesses, and progress was slowest where most needed—in Sub-Saharan Africa. Today, we ask the question some forty-two years later: What happened to the approach launched with such confidence and optimism?
In the 1970s, the World Bank and other donor agencies entered poverty reduction and rural development in a major way with IRD programs. These programs focused on participation, community empowerment, and the decentralization of local institutions, arguing that this approach is able to achieve results by aligning development priorities with community goals. In practice, however, the programs suffered the same fate as earlier community development programs, becoming centralized, bureaucratic, and unable to coordinate actors on the ground. Some countries saw decentralization as a means of dismantling command economies, others a tool for poverty reduction, and still others as a path to grassroots empowerment. Regardless of the hope the approach held out at the outset, realities in the world economy sidetracked development practitioners to more pressing challenges.
URBAN DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM
Urbanization was a powerful socio-spatial force throughout most of the world during the twentieth century. Compared with the West, high and sustained rates of urbanization in developing countries have produced enormous problems for infrastructure and service provision (Berry 1981; Mabogunje 1981; Gilbert and Gugler 1982; Linn 1983). In their attempts to deal with burgeoning urbanization, Third World national governments tried to discourage the phenomenon by mitigating the push factors for migration to cities (El-Shakhs 1972; Brennan and Richardson 1986), altering the location of investment, and decentralizing economic activities to smaller urban areas (Lipton 1976; Forbes and Thrift 1987). However, such policies proved to be futile and ineffective after wasting.
inevitability of hyper-urbanization under uneven capitalist development, policy-makers have had to confront its consequences, especially the alarming growth in the number of urban poor and their lack of access to basic services and infrastructure. A major consequence of rapid urbanization in the developing world is the prolific growth of slums and squatter settlements. This informal housing usually lacks, or has limited access to, clean water, sewerage systems, and electricity. In some instances, these dwellings constitute the housing of over 60 percent of the total urban population (Potter 1985; United Nations 1996; World Bank 2000a). However, neither the exceptional growth of Third World cities nor the deteriorating living standards of their urban poor was a major concern for international development agencies until the early 1970s. As poverty was regarded as an overwhelmingly rural problem, efforts were largely directed toward addressing rural underdevelopment. It was also believed that investment in the provision of social services and infrastructure for Third World cities would simply reinforce an existing “urban bias” that was already depriving rural areas of much needed capital and human resources (Stren 1994: 4). Thus, during the 1950s, for example, the World Bank’s lending focused solely on public utility projects, such as electric power and transportation. The Bank did not allocate funds for socially oriented development programs, such as health, education, and housing, for fear of promoting welfarism. In the late 1960s, however, a variety of internal and external forces influenced the institution to consider the poverty of developing countries. As part of this evolution in its thinking, the World Bank began to pay closer attention to urban issues. Mounting criticism resulting from increasingly visible physical manifestations of poverty by the mid-1960s (Abrams 1964; Ward 1965) eventually prodded the Bank to confront the problem. The World Bank reluctantly considered approaches to alleviating urban poverty and revised its antagonistic policy toward funding urban projects in 1972. Most of the Bank’s early interventions in poverty alleviation aimed to extend basic infrastructure to squatter settlements. After initiating an urban lending program in 1972, the Bank used its ample financial resources to assist with housing provision in the Third World. Sites-and-services and squatter upgrading were promoted by the Bank for a decade as acceptable solutions to the Third World’s housing problems. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, the Bank shifted its emphasis from project-based lending to macroeconomic management and “capacity-building,” concentrating on increasing productivity. As a consequence, its urban focus moved away from investing in specific projects, such as physical dwellings, toward the reform of urban finance and eventually toward privatization (World Bank 1991a, 1993a, 2000a). Although the World Bank has been involved in urban lending for more than three decades, there is a paucity of analysis on the history and evolution of the Bank’s approach to urban development. Most of the literature on the Bank’s urban programs has been produced by the Bank itself. While agricultural lending, structural adjustment, and the institutional structure of the World Bank have been the subjects of many studies (Torrie 1983; Havnevik 1987; Lipton and Paarlberg 1990; Miller-Adams 1999), similar analysis of the World Bank’s urban programs is lacking. For example, the Brookings Institution’s two-volume study (Kapur et al. 1997) on the first fifty years of World Bank programs dedicates only about thirty of its 2,000 pages to the Bank’s urban initiatives. While a few studies examining urban programs in specific cities do exist (Domicelj 1988; Pugh 1988, 1989a; Campbell 1990; Guarda 1990), no major works have been produced on the history of the World Bank’s urban program, the factors that led to the establishment of the Bank’s urban division, the relationships between the Bank’s urban programs and its broader development objectives, the impact of the Bank’s urban lending philosophy on urban development policy in general, or trends in the Bank’s urban lending program. This book addresses these gaps in the literature through an examination.
SMALL SCALE INDUSTRY

The World Bank Robert S. McNamara Fellowships Program (RSMFP) matches aspiring development economics researchers from developing countries with World Bank research economists creating unique opportunities for the fellows to participate in rigorous policy-relevant research in the World Bank’s Development Economics Vice Presidency (DEC). Fellows will be hosted at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. for 8 months (September to May each year) and work under the supervision of researchers in the World Bank’s Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) and Development Research Group departments, engaging in high-quality and policy-relevant research projects.
By working with World Bank DEC researchers and their external academic collaborators from top universities, fellows will learn current research standards, acquire new econometric skills, and network with leading researchers in their field. They will have a unique opportunity to participate in rigorous policy-relevant research and widen their perspective on potential development questions, and how their research can address challenges in the developing world.
World Bank’s Board of Executive Directors today approved a US$500 million International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) credit to increase access to finance for medium and small scale enterprises (MSME) in agriculture, trade, light-manufacturing, and services. These will stimulate economic growth and create jobs.
The Development Finance Project will provide stable funding to support the growth of Nigeria’s MSMEs through the establishment of a Development Finance Institution (DFI). The DFI will provide funding to eligible financial intermediaries to lend to MSMEs. The DFI would also provide partial risk guarantees to participating Commercial banks and other financial institutions.
Limited access to private finance is a key obstacle to enterprise growth and entrepreneurship, particularly for young people, and it is a major obstacle faced by SMEs. Only 9.5% of Nigerian SMEs had a loan in the books or line of credit in 2011 and SME lending made up only 5% of total commercial bank lending.
OTHER PROGRAM
In his 13 years at the Bank, he introduced key changes, most notably, shifting the Bank’s economic development policies toward targeted poverty reduction. Prior to his tenure at the World Bank, poverty did not receive substantial attention as part of international and national economic development; the focus of development had been on industrialization and infrastructure.Poverty also came to be redefined as a condition faced by people rather than countries. According to Martha Finnemore, the World Bank under McNamara’s tenure “sold” states poverty reduction “through a mixture of persuasion and coercion.”McNamara negotiated, with the conflicting countries represented on the Board, a growth in funds to channel credits for development, in the form of health, food, and education projects. He also instituted new methods of evaluating the effectiveness of funded projects. One notable project started during McNamara’s tenure was the effort to prevent river blindness.
In 1972, McNamara visited Santiago to meet President Salvador Allende to discuss the latter’s policy of nationalization, especially of the copper mining companies.McNamara’s son, Craig McNamara was living in Chile at the time, but the two did not meet owning to the rift over the Vietnam war. McNamara files stated in 1984: “I think my father truly respected Allende-his compassion, his humility. But he disapproved of the nationalizations”.The meeting with

Ukwuma Ifunanya Clara
2018/243088
Economics Department
ECO 362 Assignment.
ANSWER.
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved.
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism,to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

Name: Owoh Chiamaka Philia
Reg No.: 2019/247552 (2/3)
Course Code: Eco 362
Course Title: Development Economics
Assignment on Eco 362
Answer:
Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics and excelling in his studies. His personal experiences during the Great Depression and the liberal outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. He enrolled in the Harvard Business School in 1937 and it was here that he acquired the management techniques that became characteristic of his leadership style. The concept of management based on the accumulation and analysis of quantitative data appealed to his disciplined mind and provided him with a tool for exercising control in uncertain conditions.
He applied this management style in the military during World War II and in private industry (Ford Motor Company) after the war. The aggressive new management techniques earned McNamara and his colleagues the nickname “Whiz Kids.” In November 1960 McNamara was named president of Ford Motor Company. But after only one month in this position, McNamara was called to the new Kennedy administration to serve as Secretary of Defense, with a mandate to bring the military under control through the application of efficient management.
McNamara quickly became involved in the substance and politics of government administration, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson sought his advice on defense, foreign policy, and international relations. The Vietnam War claimed much of McNamara’s time and energy at the Defense Department, and over the years he began to feel that victory in this war was impossible. His thinking on the war gradually diverged from that of President Johnson, and Johnson abruptly nominated McNamara as the next World Bank president.
Role of the World Bank
The World Bank was, McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
War Against Porverty
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions. From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period. One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica. McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold. Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education. McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.
Important/Function of Social Welfare;
Social welfare is actually one of the government’s policies, aimed at providing assistance to members of the society particularly, the needy and the less privileged families in the society. Social welfare focuses on the quality of those governed and not necessarily about the standard of living of a people. Whereas it has to do with the provision of conducive environment for the governed.
The environment in this context include, the land, the water and the air. It is about the provision of essential social services for the people. Essential services, such as provision of financial assistance to the aged members of the society, who could not work and the unemployed youths in an organized society, who could not gain or secure themselves employment.
Moreso, social services like, provision of health care for the sick in the society and provision of education to those members of the society, who could not afford themselves education are also inclusive.
Government’s social welfare is important, given the fact that, it allows for a system where members of the society particularly, the less-privileged can enjoy their fundamental rights, and as well, access a good number of social amenities as provided by the government.
However, social welfare is important in many ways, they include;
1. It Alleviate Poverty Among the Members of the Society:
The number one reason why social welfare is important is that, it allow members of the society particularly, those disadvantaged members of the society to benefit from such services. They however, portrayed why the government should work for the well-being of its citizenry. In Nigeria, there are so many poor people living in this country, who by the virtue of their citizenship deserve such social services from their government. They are entitled for government’s social welfare programs. Such social welfare programs are expected to help alleviate the level of poverty among this set of members of the society. Therefore, it is mostly the disadvantaged members of the society, who stand to benefit greatly from social welfare policy of the government. So any government that prides itself in enacting the social welfare law or rule and implement same for the benefit of the less-privileged does so at its own good.
Why? The reason is obvious. Any government that takes the welfare of its citizens as a top priority is likely to deduce the number of poor people in the society hence, lessen the rate of crime. Looking at it from another angle, social welfare programs do boost society’s economy.
2. It Put Government on its Toe And Make it Pragmatic:
Secondly, why social welfare is important is that, while looking at the importance of social welfare policies, it is important to also note that, administering this policy is the sole responsibility of government. And in most cases government do get strapped for funds. And because of fiscal problems, government do run what I may described as ‘large deficits’ annually. Therefore, a goverment that must succeed need be prudent and pragmatic in implementing social welfare policies to the benefit of its citizenry. It therefore become incumbent on the part of government to be smarter, sit to its responsibilities, and do more than expected in ensuring that social welfare policy work in order to avoid wasting the public funds while administering social welfare that is of no value to its citizenry.
It is a program that put a government on its toe to deliver dividends of governance to its people. Therefore, it is critical to have a well defined social welfare policy and program for the good of the governed and the government.
3. It Helps Government to Maximize Waste Of Public Funds Through Legislature’s Oversight Functions:
Morso, social welfare policy as stated earlier is very important since it alleviate poverty among the members of the society and allow for quality lives of these people. It is designed to solve some of the societal problems.
Be that as it may, some government officials can and do abuse the system hence, the growing rate of poverty in Nigeria. And since social welfare is a means to an end, and not the other way round, it can call for the lawmakers in the state or in the National Assembly to engage profoundly in the policy and program of social welfare through its oversight functions so as to strike a balance by ensuring that a number of citizens benefit from the program, as well as, ensuring social welfare program’s cost effective, and minimization of waste on the part of the Executive, while implementing the social welfare policy. And if at all, waste is avoided and the policy is beneficial to the members of the public, such a success will spur the lawmakers to allot more funds for social welfare programs in future budgets.
4. It Avails Members Of The Public An Opportunity To Engage Themselves In Positive Adventure:
It will interest us to know that, first and foremost, the social welfare is designed and developed towards assisting members of the public especially, the disadvantaged members of the society with a view to alleviate poverty. The social welfare program also serves as an opportunity to some risk households to avial themselves of such opportunity in maintaining and preserving their dignity as human. Social welfare policy and program, apart from addressing issues related to poverty, for example, crime among the younger generation and mental disorder among the members of the society, occasioned by depression. It also give some members of the public an opportunity to engage themselves in positive adventure.
The Impact Of Social Welfare In National Development
Limited research is being done by scholars and researchers concerning the impact of social welfare on economic development in most developed countries. According to Jungsub Shin, “average welfare spending levels in most advanced industrial democracies are now between 20 and 28 percent of GDP”. (qtd. in
M “Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development” 430) The question is why do the proportions of social welfare expenditures in most developed countries make up for almost three-tenths of the country’s GDP? What is the economic impact of such a high proportion of government social welfare expenditure? Social welfare in western developed countries is always an argumentative topic in today’s society. People argue the impact of social welfare on economic development.
A) Scholars With Positive Views: James Griffin outlines that the reason for high social welfare expenditures in most developed countries is because “welfare rights are often classed as ‘positive’ rights, in contrast to ‘negative’ rights such as not being prevented from choosing one’s own goals (autonomy) and not being interfered with in their pursuit (liberty)” (28). He points out that social welfare is regarded by most developed countries as the progress of a country. He states that social welfare not only guarantees people’s freedom but also guarantees people to pursue their goals.
B) Scholars with negative views According to Lene Aarøe and Michael Bang Petersen, the active social welfare system in most western developed countries may “reinforce the effect of the laziness” (694). In other words, he means that active social welfare makes people lazy. Because social welfare is so good, people can live without working hard. Laziness directly affects the economic development of companies and countries. Assar Lindbeck mentions that “if we do not watch out for hazardous dynamics, there is a risk that the welfare state will destroy its own economic foundations” (9). He notes that western countries welfare systems have disadvantages. He thinks that if western developed countries do not pay attention to the harmful effects of the welfare, the welfare system will seriously damage the country’s economy. According to Paul de Beer and Ferry Koster, with the development of today’s modern society, “individualization and globalization render the welfare state unsustainable in the long run” (219). Paul de Beer and Ferry Koster describe that “individualization and globalization” (219) make competition among countries fiercer. They think that welfare makes the whole country unable to adapt to today’s global development, and welfare is not good for the long-term development of the country. Although the welfare system brings “social rights” to citizens, “social rights” can also “legitimize the very inequalities which markets produced” (Moran 399). He means that the defects of welfare in most western developed countries make the market more unfair. Citizens have too many rights are not good for market management
C) THE ECONOMIC IMPACT OF SOCIAL WELFARE
A. People who support social welfare
1) Social welfare system promotes redistribution: In the article entitled “The Multidimensionality of Welfare State Attitudes: A European Cross-National Study”, Femke Roosma et al. state that the main goal of welfare is to achieve social equity through the secondary distribution of income and resources. Welfare system alleviates injustice in society, so that people in the society can earn money in an equal position. Social equity plays an important role in the development of the country’s economy, so social welfare is beneficial to the healthy development of the national economy. For example, Roosma states that in a competitive market, in order to allocate “scarce resources” (qtd. in Roemer 237), society need to distribute or “redistribute” (237) resources fairly. Roosma also tell us with the development of “democratization” and “industrialization”, making “redistribution a matter of justice and an urgent societal problem” (qtd. in Fleischaccker 237). The emergence of welfare aims to solve the unfair problems in the process of national economic development through “redistribution” (237). Redistribution “[reallocates] life chances by giving people equal opportunities and a certain socio-economic status” (237). He mentions that in today’s modern society, the redistribution of resources in welfare state is of great significance to social justice. The welfare state applies the fairness to every distribution of society in an effort to make people believe in the fairness of the system. The goal of the welfare is to give everyone equal rights, and fair redistribution gives people more chances to develop economic throughout the process of welfare system.
2) Social welfare system brings vitality to the market: What’s more, Roomsa tells us in recent decades “welfare policies emphasise activation of people for the labour market or other forms of societal participation” (239). People have working passion can help to transfer “welfare to workfare” (239). He explains to us that social welfare brings energy to the market by promoting social equity. Social equity let people not be treated unfairly in the workplace, so people will be more energetic in the work. If people are lazy in their work, even if more people participate in production, it will still not promote the development of the company. Only when people’s work is active, the country’s economy can develop. Therefore, social welfare is beneficial to the healthy development of the national economy. Welfare aims to make people generally benefit, so welfare system does lots of effort to promote social justice. Social justice. It plays an important role in the development of country’s economy.
B. People who are against social welfare
1) Social welfare system increases unemployment: Firstly, social welfare reduces the number of
employees, thus reducing the company’s output, which eventually slows down the speed of national economic development. With fewer productive people in society, the country’s economy will no longer growing. In “Welfare State Institutions and Labor Market Trends,” Dr. Martin Ehlert, a researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center, points out that unemployment payments in the United States “coverage of almost all industries-leading to a wide variety of unemployment compensation policies throughout the country” (70). From his words, we can see that the country’s social welfare gives unemployed people in various industries “unemployment compensation” (Ehlert 70), so that people do not have to worry about their survival after losing their jobs. For example, Ehlert states that in Germany, “[s]ince 1998, the unemployed receive 67 percent of their former monthly net wages if they live with children and 60 per cent if they live without children” (71). Ehlert uses data to prove to us that if the unemployed people don’t work, they can still get more than half of their original salary. People in welfare countries do not have to worry about being unable to live without work, because if they are unemployed, they can receive subsidies from their countries. Above we can see that if there are more people who are not working in the society, this will not only increase the government’s subsidy cost, but also reduce the company’s output. Robert H. Haveman, a professor of economics at University of Melbourne, states that “in both the United States and Western Europe, the long￾duration unemployment rate has been secularly increasing” (44). He points out that the problem of increasing number of unemployed people is common in developed welfare countries. The reason why we research the relationship and impact of welfare policy on the “unemployment rate” is because the welfare policy plays an important role in “dealing with the labor market” (Rueda et al. 296). In addition, Rueda’s point of view prefers to support that “the welfare state today remains a powerful buffer between unemployment and inequality” (296). He thinks that the main reason for unemployment is because of welfare policy. Due to welfare policy, unemployment situation in welfare state will be more severe. A lot of unemployed people will cause fewer people in the companies to provide goods. With fewer companies providing goods, the economic level of the country will naturally decrease, which eventually slows down the speed of national economic development. Therefore, with fewer productive people in society, the country’s economy is no longer growing. High social welfare will eventually be harmful to the economy.
2) Social welfare system increases government burden: Secondly, social welfare increases the government’s financial spending, which eventually
slows down the speed of national economic development. With the increasing proportion of social welfare spending in government finances, government’s financial pressure will continue to increase and its economy will continue to decrease. According to Claus Offe, a professor emeritus of political sociology at the
Hertie School of Governance, “welfare state has become too heavy a burden on the economy, the growth potential and competitiveness of which are consequently seen to suffer from the excessive costs and rigidities” (504). In other words, he points out that government huge social welfare spending actually increases the production cost of companies. If the production cost is too high, companies will lose profit. As a result, companies have to stop production. Companies stop production will slow down the development of the welfare state economy. What’s more, government huge financial spending is not good for the healthy development of the economy. Greece is a typical country, so let’s take Greece as an example. Sofia Vasilopoulou and Daphne Halikiopoulou state that “since the eruption of the eurozone crisis in late 2009, Greece has plunged into deep recession” (14). They argue that Greek government’s huge welfare spending leads the country’s economy to be in a big trouble. Vasilopoulou and Halikiopoulou state that “austerity measures increase taxes on income and property, sales taxes rise from 19 percent to 23 percent, and the tax-free threshold for income has lowered significantly. All sectors of the population suffered, especially the middle class” (14). They mean that because Greece’s current economic situation is bad, and Greek government is not wealthy, so Greek government has to takes measures to increase government revenue and reduce people’s consumption by raising taxes. Increasing taxes by Greek government causes a decline in living standards for almost all Greeks, and many people become poor as a result. Increasing taxes will cause Greece’s economy even worse. During the time of economic difficulty, “Greek citizens increasingly lost their trust in the system,” and “the legitimacy of the system is called into question” (Vasilopoulou and Halikiopoulou 15). Greek government has to collect taxes from people’s daily consumption and production in order to pay for welfare. A large part of benefits of people’s production are used to pay taxes to the government, which makes people’s live difficult and country’s economic in danger. Because the economy of welfare state is not energetic, companies and individuals will find it hard to make money. Therefore, social welfare will eventually slow down the speed of national economic development. High social welfare is harmful to the economy.
3) Social welfare system reduces market efficiency: Social welfare system actually imposes great pressure on the development of companies and the national economy. Welfare makes the country’s market poor efficiency, which seriously blocks country’s economic progress. For example, according to data from Femke Roosma’s survey of 22 European countries in 2008, Roosma says that “the European public is most critical about the welfare state’s effectiveness: About 50-60 % perceive substantial abuse and underuse of welfare benefits” (243). He mentions that more than half of the people in European society think that the efficiency level of their countries is very low. People from 22 European countries also believe that country does not allocate welfare properly. Some people may try to get more benefits provided by the government to avoid their responsibilities, and at the same time some people may not fully enjoy the convenience of welfare. The lack of proper allocation benefits in the welfare state will make people realize that welfare leads to social injustice, which is contrary to the goal of the welfare. Also, according to data from Femke Roosma’s survey of 22 European countries in 2008, Roosma says that there is a “relatively high correlation of 0.538 between the dimensions efficiency and outcomes-policy” (244). This result shows “an inefficient system will cause poor policy outcome” (244). He wants to tell us that the efficiency of a country has a great impact on the results of a national policy. According to the first example above, we see that welfare can lead to inefficiency, and from this example we can continue to see that inefficiency can make the government’s policies worse. The failure to implement government policies is not conducive to the healthy development of the country. Roomsa says “such disappointment with the welfare state’s outcomes may lead to decreasing legitimacy” (244). Welfare does not achieve the expected results. The legal effect of welfare has declined, and people no longer believe that welfare can bring justice to society and promote economic progress. Therefore, social welfare system actually imposes great pressure on the development of companies and the national economy. Welfare makes the market poor efficiency, which seriously blocks country’s economic progress.Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, volume 15077
CONCLUSION:
To sum up, in the face of global competition in today’s society, the impact of high social welfare on economic development has always been a controversial topic. Western developed countries’ social welfare system has the characteristics of equalization, universalization, high fiscal expenditure, and government burden. The political system of a country is closely related to its economy. Nowadays, a group of people question the legitimacy of the system. High welfare is a double-edged sword, so how to maintain high welfare under the background of capital globalization still needs to be tested.

Name: Ugwu Emmanuel chibuike
Reg no: 2019/248403
Department: education economics

The World Bank is an international organization dedicated to providing financing, advice, and research to developing nations to aid their economic advancement. The bank predominantly acts as an organization that attempts to fight poverty by offering developmental assistance to middle- and low-income countries.
The past 70 years have seen major changes in the world economy. Over that time, the World Bank Group—the world’s largest development institution—has worked to help more than 100 developing countries and countries in transition adjust to these changes by offering loans and tailored knowledge and advice. The Bank Group works with country governments, the private sector, civil society organizations, regional development banks, think tanks, and other international institutions on issues ranging from climate change, conflict, and food security to education, agriculture, finance, and trade. All of these efforts support the Bank Group’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity of the poorest 40 percent of the population in all countries.
Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions. Originally, its loans helped rebuild countries devastated by World War II. In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads. With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal. The subsequent launch of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency further rounded out the Bank Group’s ability to connect global financial resources to the needs of developing countries.

Name: Peter Emmanuel uzoma
Reg no: 2018/246577
Department : education/economics
Assignment
The World Bank is one of the world’s largest sources of funding and knowledge for developing countries. Its five institutions share a commitment to reducing poverty, increasing shared prosperity, and promoting sustainable development.
Together, IBRD and IDA form the World Bank, which provides financing, policy advice, and technical assistance to governments of developing countries. IDA focuses on the world’s poorest countries, while IBRD assists middle-income and creditworthy poorer countries.
IFC, MIGA, and ICSID focus on strengthening the private sector in developing countries. Through these institutions, the World Bank Group provides financing, technical assistance, political risk insurance, and settlement of disputes to private enterprises, including financial institutions.
The speed and scale of urbanization brings challenges, including meeting accelerated demand for affordable housing, well-connected transport systems, and other infrastructure, basic services, as well as jobs, particularly for the nearly 1 billion urban poor who live in informal settlements to be near opportunities. Conflicts are on the rise, resulting in 60% of forcibly displaced people living in urban areas.
Once a city is built, its physical form and land use patterns can be locked in for generations, leading to unsustainable sprawl. The expansion of urban land consumption outpaces population growth by as much as 50%, which is expected to add 1.2 million km² of new urban built up area to the world in the three decades. Such sprawl puts pressure on land and natural resources, resulting in undesirable outcomes; cities consume two thirds of global energy consumption and account for more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions.
Cities play an increasingly important role in tackling climate change, because their exposure to climate and disaster risk increases as they grow. Almost half a billion urban residents live in coastal areas, increasing their vulnerability to storm surges and sea level rise. In the 136 biggest coastal cities, there are 100 million people – or 20% of their population – and $4.7 trillion in assets exposed to coastal floods. Around 90% of urban expansion in developing countries is near hazard-prone areas and built through informal and unplanned settlements.
In 2017, the World Bank created the Human Capital Project, which seeks to help countries invest in and develop their people to be productive citizens and active contributors to their economy.1 World leaders are urged to prioritize investments in education, healthcare, and social protections, and, in return, they will realize a stronger economy full of healthy, thriving adults.
The Human Capital project outlines how governments should invest in providing quality, affordable childcare to support and improve child development, increase women’s access to better employment opportunities, and increase economic growth, to name a few.
To build human capital globally, the World Bank has identified several areas of focus: the Human Capital Index (HCI), measurement and research, and country engagement. Created in October 2018, the Human Capital Index summarizes a nation’s investments in its human capital, specifically concerning health and education. The index is used to identify what is lost from the lack of investments in human capital; it also prompts leaders to think of how to remedy these deficiencies.
The World Bank is an organization, rather than a bank. Therefore, its financials are not comparable to traditional financial institutions. Within the organization operates different sectors: the International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Association (IDA), the International Finance Corporation (IFC), and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA).
The IBRD, the original World Bank, loans money to creditworthy low-income or middle-income countries. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2020, the IBRD recorded net interest revenues of $2,414 million and allocable income of $1,381 million. Its equity-to-loans ratio was 22.8%.
The IDA issues credits, or interest-free loans, to the poorest nations. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2020, the World Bank recorded an adjusted net income of $724 million and a deployable strategic capital (DSC) ratio of 35.8%, which is the available capital divided by the capital needed to support the portfolio.
IFC provides funds and guidance to the private sector for the purpose of helping developing nations stay on a growth trajectory. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2020, the World Bank recorded net income loss of $1,672 million and a total comprehensive income loss of $2,424. Its DSC ratio was 18%.
Lastly, MIGA directs investments to the poorest countries to help reduce poverty and improve the welfare of a nation’s citizens. For the fiscal year ended June 30, 2020, the World Bank recorded net interest revenues of $57 million.For the fiscal year 2020, the World Bank has distributed $27,975.99 million in IBRD loans, $22,423.69 in interest-free loans or credits, and $7,991.47 million in grants.

Name : Chimezie Chiamaka Victoria
Reg no : 2018/242202
Email osvictoria70@gmail.com
Yes. Between 1973 and 1980 the world bank led by Robert mc namara became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries this was because at that time the world bank had made partnership with central banks of other countries to improve areas and programs which will lead to an improved welfare of nations. These growth can be noticed in the equity program which came as a result of the new program that was initiated by the world bank.loans given by the world bank helped in developing program which improved the health, nutrition, family planning, education of the people. The main aim of these programs was to provide for the Improvement of the under employed sector of the economy and citizens of the country ie providing vaccines to minimize effects of deadly diseases, assist people in getting good food and nutrition. Note that before this program no family planning, but the world bank aid in raising consiousness on the NEW.

NAME: OKONKWO CHINAZA FAVOUR
REG NO: 2018/242315
DEPARTMENT: ECONOMICS

DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1960’S AND 1970’S AND THE WORLD BANK LENDING

The world was founded in the 1940’s and originally, it’s loans were to helped rebuild countries devastated by world war II and to improve economic development. After the European recovery program took over the responsibility of reconstructing Europe, the world bank focus shifted from reconstruction to development with heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams,roads, electricity etc, industry and agriculture. The world bank project lending to the developing countries was intending to create an enabling environment for the factors that leads to economic growth.
Many developing nation’s witnessed an increase in their GDP but these economic growth was accompanied by uneven distribution of resources. In addition, these development program tends to favour industrialization over agriculture development coupled with rural urban migration, all these led to increased poverty in many less developed nations.
Due to these increased poverty, there was a shift which tends towards the eradication of poverty. The world bank established a social program which was to directly address poverty through improving education,health, housing, transportation and energy. The shift to program lending reflected the world bank shift to equity from growth even though project lending which aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry and agriculture continued.

NAME: MBASO RALUCHI
REG NO: 2018/242437
DEPARTMENT: ECONOMICS

The world bank, is an organization made up of member countries, formed by a Board of Governors, this Board controls the organization, generates policies, and determines executive directors. The executive directors controls all the Bank’s business. The president and managers direct the daily activities.
Robert McNamara examined the principal issue to ascertain economic growth. His interests were on Latin American economies and expectations for increased lendings in education and agriculture. He resolved to achieve equitable distribution of the benefits of increased production, balanced growth, export diversification, strengthened regional cooperation. He stared that spontaneous population growth has a negative effect on economic growth and emphasized the importance of stabilizing population growth. McNamara was never constrained by the Bank’s tradition of financial prudence. He felt that the daunting problems faced by the world required daring and risk-taking. Upon his arrival at the Bank, McNamara was surprised at what he considered the small volume of lending the Bank had made compared to the vastness of the needs. He developed an elaborate system of numerical reporting tables that provide complete and up-to-date pictures of the lending program and country needs: the Bank’s balance sheet, cash flow, lending program, and borrowing requirements. These reporting methods grew progressively more complex as McNamara insisted that more data be included in the reports. Bank commitments increased from an annual level of about $1 billion in 1968 to over $13 billion in fiscal 1981. Governments were urged to speed up the preparation of appropriate projects to expedite the increased lending. McNamara quickly realized that a list of individual projects for a particular member country should conform to an overall development strategy, and in 1969 he instituted the practice of creating Country Program Papers.
The world bank has helped developing countries, it works with the government and private sectors to enhance their economic growth, it focuses on dealing with the major economic problems nations faced after the cold war. The drive was to completely eradicate poverty, hence they supported development through loans to countries to supported education and health care facilities, extractive activities, food production and agricultural activities . The bank tries to promote strategies that leads to economic success. It tries to address critical issues while paving way for sustainable development.
World bank continued lending towards particular development projects of countries because that is the aim of the bank. As economists, we know that Improvements in health care, educational infrastructures, better trading environment are all necessities towards attaining economic growth. Hence the projected lending is simply a rational decision by the world bank.

Name: Nelson Favour Ogechukwu
Reg No: 2018/245389
Dept: Education Economics
Email: nelsonfavour38@gmail.com
Eco. 362 (Online Discussion/Quiz 14-01-2022–Development in 1960s and 70s and World Bank Lending)

Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.

From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.

McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.

He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.

Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.

McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.
Reference
https://www.worldbank.org/en/archive/history/past-presidents/robert-strange-mcnamara

The 5th President of the world bank, Robert McNamara carried out a great activity in his tenure as the President, which really impacted the poor developing countries at that time. He helped jn the eradication of poverty amongst various poor countries by working hand in hand with the various rulers or government of the various countries. Not just working with them but also supplying the necessary capital to these various countries in the form of loans, which enabled them develop their infrastructures as well as other crucial sectors of its economy. Its is recorded in history that he is the first to carry out such an act as the President of the world bank. came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. Ever since the tenure of McNamara,the Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. They became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

NAME: EZENWA CHIBUZO FRANKLIN
REG NO: 2018/242324
EMAIL:Chibuzofranklin1000@gmail.com
Dept : Education/economics
Assignment
ANSWER

Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
Personal History of mcNamara

Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics and excelling in his studies. His personal experiences during the Great Depression and the liberal outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. He enrolled in the Harvard Business School in 1937 and it was here that he acquired the management techniques that became characteristic of his leadership style. The concept of management based on the accumulation and analysis of quantitative data appealed to his disciplined mind and provided him with a tool for exercising control in uncertain conditions.
Role of the World Bank

The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
Funding the Bank
McNamara’s sharply increased level of lending necessitated a quantum leap in mobilizing both conventional and concessional resources. When McNamara arrived at the Bank, the climate for a massive increase of development aid was unfavorable. The UN Development Decade resulted in some donor fatigue as development problems persisted. Despite the adverse economic situation (the Bank’s liquidity was low, necessitating a temporary suspension of lending toward the end of George Woods’ tenure; IDA replenishment negotiations were stalled; and the US Treasury refused permission for the Bank to enter the capital market with any large issues), McNamara announced that in his first five years the Bank’s net borrowing would increase to three times the level of the previous five years.

Robert S. McNamara
5th President of the World Bank Group, 1968 – 1981
Robert Strange McNamara, 1916 – 2009
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
Role of the World Bank
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
Enlarging the Bank
McNamara was never constrained by the Bank’s tradition of financial prudence. He felt that the daunting problems faced by the world required daring and risk-taking. Upon his arrival at the Bank, McNamara was surprised at what he considered the small volume of lending the Bank had made compared to the vastness of the needs. He developed an elaborate system of numerical reporting tables that provide complete and up-to-date pictures of the lending program and country needs: the Bank’s balance sheet, cash flow, lending program, and borrowing requirements. These reporting methods grew progressively more complex as McNamara insisted that more data be included in the reports.
Robert McNamara in front of the Bank’s Main Complex.
Bank commitments increased from an annual level of about $1 billion in 1968 to over $13 billion in fiscal 1981. Governments were urged to speed up the preparation of appropriate projects to expedite the increased lending. McNamara quickly realized that a list of individual projects for a particular member country should conform to an overall development strategy, and in 1969 he instituted the practice of creating Country Program Papers.
The proposed increase in the Bank’s activities required a rapid expansion in the number of staff. Between 1968 and 1973 the professional staff increased in number by 125%. The staff as a whole grew from 1,600 at the time he took over to 5,700 when he left in 1981. In addition to the increase in numbers, the nationality diversification of staff was increased. The results of these simultaneous changes caused some degree of tension and strain among staff during this period.
McNamara also decided that the Bank’s organizational structure required an overhaul. With an expanding volume of business the system of large centralized projects departments and geographical regional departments became unwieldy and bureaucratic. In 1972 he hired McKinsey & Co. to analyze the existing structure and business and to make recommendations for change. McNamara followed the process closely and in 1972 a major reorganizaiton of the Bank took place. Responsibility for lending was placed in the hands of regional vice presidents, who had control over resources required to meet agreed output targets.
McNamara expanded the geographical range of the Bank’s lending, and the Bank became actively engaged in all countries that needed help. He re-established lending relationships with Egypt and Indonesia, and the latter became one of the Bank’s most important country programs. McNamara took personal charge of the membership negotiations with the People’s Republic of China. The prospect of extending the Bank’s support to a country with a billion people was a fascinating challenge for McNamara, and he used his considerable political skills to expedite membership. In May 1980, the People’s Republic of China assumed its membership in the Bank.
The drastic increase in lending activities stimulated a debate over project quantity versus quality.
WAR ON POVERTY.
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.
From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.
McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.
Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.
McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

Reg No: 2018/241234
Department: Education/Economics
Course Code: ECO 362
Course Title: Development Economics 2

1. Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations.  Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

Answer:
  Robert S. Mcnamara, (born June 9, 1916, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died July 6, 2009, Washington, D.C.), U.S. secretary of defense from 1961 to 1968 who revamped Pentagon operations and who played a major role in the nation’s military involvement in the Vietnam War. As early as 1965, however, McNamara had privately begun to question the wisdom of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and by 1967 he was openly seeking a way to launch peace negotiations. He initiated a top-secret full-scale investigation of the American commitment to Vietnam (later published as The Pentagon Papers), came out in opposition to continued bombing of North Vietnam (for which he lost influence in the Johnson administration), and in February 1968 left the Pentagon to become president of the World Bank. In his 13-year tenure as head of that institution, McNamara displayed what was generally regarded as great sensitivity to the needs of Third World nations. He retired from the World Bank in 1981 but remained active in many other organizations. He addressed issues such as world hunger, East-West relations, and other policy matters.
      McNamara was never constrained by the Bank’s tradition of financial prudence. He felt that the daunting problems faced by the world required daring and risk-taking. Upon his arrival at the Bank, McNamara was surprised at what he considered the small volume of lending the Bank had made compared to the vastness of the needs. He developed an elaborate system of numerical reporting tables that provide complete and up-to-date pictures of the lending program and country needs: the Bank’s balance sheet, cash flow, lending program, and borrowing requirements. These reporting methods grew progressively more complex as McNamara insisted that more data be included in the reports. Bank commitments increased from an annual level of about $1 billion in 1968 to over $13 billion in fiscal 1981. Governments were urged to speed up the preparation of appropriate projects to expedite the increased lending.
       McNamara quickly realized that a list of individual projects for a particular member country should conform to an overall development strategy, and in 1969 he instituted the practice of creating Country Program Papers. The proposed increase in the Bank’s activities required a rapid expansion in the number of staff. Between 1968 and 1973 the professional staff increased in number by 125%. The staff as a whole grew from 1,600 at the time he took over to 5,700 when he left in 1981. In addition to the increase in numbers, the nationality diversification of staff was increased. The results of these simultaneous changes caused some degree of tension and strain among staff during this period. The task of raising the necessary IDA funding – concessional funds for the Bank Group’s poorest members – became a personal challenge for McNamara. He used his extensive political contacts to bolster Congressional support in the U.S. He contacted prominent and persuasive people in the U.K., the Netherlands and Kuwait to urge positive action for IDA. McNamara’s efforts were successful. IDA replenishment amounts increased from an annual rate of $400 million in the second replenishment to $4 billion during the sixth. Some of this increase was automatically eaten up by rapid inflation during this period, but in real terms, IDA resources more than doubled between the fourth and sixth replenishment. Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.
From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period. One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica. McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers. He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold. Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.

References
1.https://www.worldbank.org/en/archive/history/past-presidents/robert-strange-mcnamara

2.https://www.britannica.com/topic/Harvard-University

Molokwu Chiamaka Goodness
2018/242393
ECONOMICS

By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978). These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development that we know today.

Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold between 1968 and 1981, and expanded into new sectors: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, and others. The global effort to eradicate river blindness is one example of how the Bank worked to improve the lives of the poor, which was different from the large infrastructure projects that were done in the Bank’s first 20 y ears. The first loan for the environment was in 1971 for pollution control in Brazil, and the Bank subsequently built environmental safeguards into its process. During the 1970s economists were the primary advisers in the Bank, but staff with different skills in anthropology, sociology, environmental science and other sectors were hired to provide even more expertise to clients.
McNamara’s arrival to the World Bank presidency profoundly marked its history. Evoking the connection between security and development, McNamara stated that economic backwardness and the contradictions of modernization opened the doors to ideological radicals. For that reason, “without internal development, at least to a minimum level, order and stability are impossible”. This approach was related to Washington`s recognition of the failure of its predom-inantly military approach followed in Vietnam. This explains the US government’s emphasis on the increase of multilateral aid over bilateral aid, since according to Washington, the WB and the other MDBs could raise funds and make loans to peripheral countries geopolitically relevant to the US, without attracting direct criti-cism of its foreign policy and without the economic burden of bilateral programs. Assuming the position, McNamara stated that the balance of the ‘dec-ade of development’ was “disappointing” because income inequality among states had increased and the majority of the population of the planet lived in extreme conditions, despite the increase of rates of economic growth in large parts of the world. All this im-plied the recognition that the benefits of growth had not flowed downwards, as ‘trickle-down’ doctrine preached. According to McNamara, it was no longer valid to suppose that growth would necessarily lead to the reduction of poverty8. It was necessary to distin-guish them conceptually and to approach them in a separate and direct manner. On the other hand, McNamara denied that the reduction of poverty would occur at the cost of growth -as the immense majority of economists (inside and outside the World Bank) at that time stated-, insisting on its centrality. The slogan of the ‘assault on poverty’ was at the core of the new administration’s discourse. In its name, the McNamara administration more than doubled the loan portfo-lio. There was a considerable expansion of loans to the agricultural sector and, to a lesser degree, for social ‘purposes,’ such as education, basic sanitation, nutrition, urban hous-ing, and family planning. Although disbursements for Asia were intensified, operations in Africa and Latin America proportionally increased more. McNamara established annual loan targets for each country and defined that each employee’s professional efficiency would be assessed according to the volume of funds involved in projects for which they were responsible. Thus, the imperative of ‘moving the money’ at any cost became one of the most striking marks of the organizational culture of the World Bank.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters

Udeh Josephine Nkemakoram
2018/241843
300 l
Economics
Eco 362
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He believed that world problems could be solved with the right financing. The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.“ He sharply increased the level of lending to developing countries, even when they faced the oil shock levels rose, funded by OPEC.
IDA replenishment negotiations were stalled: The International Development Association (IDA) is the part of the World Bank that helps the world’s poorest countries. Established in 1960, IDA aims to reduce poverty by providing zero to low-interest loans (called “credits”) and grants for programs that boost economic growth, reduce inequalities, and improve people’s living conditions.
In 1975 he introduced the “third window” lending, an attempt to leverage limited concessional funds. And he attempted to create a separate energy affiliate to assist developing countries in the improvement of their energy position.
He emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.
Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

Name: Ugwu Chikaodinaka Augustina
Reg no: 2018/246451
Course: eco 362
Dept: Economics

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a major role in most economies, particularly in developing countries. SMEs account for the majority of businesses worldwide and are important contributors to job creation and global economic development. They represent about 90% of businesses and more than 50% of employment worldwide. Formal SMEs contribute up to 40% of national income (GDP) in emerging economies. These numbers are significantly higher when informal SMEs are included. According to our estimates, 600 million jobs will be needed by 2030 to absorb the growing global workforce, which makes SME development a high priority for many governments around the world. In emerging markets, most formal jobs are generated by SMEs, which create 7 out of 10 jobs. However, access to finance is a key constraint to SME growth, it is the second most cited obstacle facing SMEs to grow their businesses in emerging markets and developing countries.

SMEs are less likely to be able to obtain bank loans than large firms; instead, they rely on internal funds, or cash from friends and family, to launch and initially run their enterprises. The International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates that 65 million firms, or 40% of formal micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in developing countries, have an unmet financing need of $5.2 trillion every year, which is equivalent to 1.4 times the current level of the global MSME lending. East Asia And Pacific accounts for the largest share (46%) of the total global finance gap and is followed by Latin America and the Caribbean (23%) and Europe and Central Asia (15%). The gap volume varies considerably region to region. Latin America and the Caribbean and the Middle East and North Africa regions, in particular, have the highest proportion of the finance gap compared to potential demand, measured at 87% and 88%, respectively. About half of formal SMEs don’t have access to formal credit. The financing gap is even larger when micro and informal enterprises are taken into account.

What We Do
A key area of the World Bank Group’s work is to improve SMEs’ access to finance and find innovative solutions to unlock sources of capital.
Our approach is holistic, combining advisory and lending services to clients to increase the contribution that SMEs can make to the economy including underserved segments such as women owned SMEs.
Advisory and Policy Support for SME finance mainly includes diagnostics, implementation support, global advocacy and knowledge sharing of good practice. For example we provide;

– Financial sector assessments to determine areas of improvement in regulatory and policy aspects enabling increased responsible SME access to finance.

– Implementation support of initiatives such as development of enabling environment, design and set up of credit guarantee schemes.

– Improving credit infrastructure (credit reporting systems, secured transactions and collateral registries, and insolvency regimes) which can lead to greater SME access to finance.

– Introducing innovation in SME finance such as e-lending platforms, use of alternative data for credit decisioning, e-invoicing, e-factoring and supply chain financing.

– Policy work, analytical work, and other Advisory Services can also be provided in support of SME finance activities.

– Advocacy for SME finance at global level through participating and supporting G20 Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion, Financial Stability Board, International Credit Committee for Credit Reporting on SME Finance related issues.

– Knowledge management tools and flagship publications on good practice, successful models and policy frameworks.

NAME: E-PATRICK DALOSAH
REG NUMBER: 2018/242457
DEPARTMENT:ECONOMICS
LEVEL:300
COURSE CODE: ECO 362

Robert McNamara born in 1916, shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.

McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular.
     The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
McNamara expanded the geographical range of the Bank’s lending, and the Bank became actively engaged in all countries that needed help. He re-established lending relationships with Egypt and Indonesia, and the latter became one of the Bank’s most important country programs. McNamara took personal charge of the membership negotiations with the People’s Republic of China. The prospect of extending the Bank’s support to a country with a billion people was a fascinating challenge for McNamara, and he used his considerable political skills to expedite membership. In May 1980, the People’s Republic of China assumed its membership in the Bank.
     The drastic increase in lending activities stimulated a debate over project quantity versus quality. McNamara denied that increased lending would sacrifice project quality, insisting that the same sound appraisal methods would be used. In fact, the appraisal process became more rigorous and sophisticated, the amount of staff time devoted to preparation and appraisal increased, and conditions designed to safeguard implementation and project supervision became more extensive. Nevertheless, there was a widespread perception among the staff that quality was being sacrificed for quantity.

Early-Stage SME Finance
In Lebanon, the Innovative Small and Medium Enterprises (iSME) project is a $30 million investment lending operation providing equity co-investments in innovative young firms in addition to a grant funding window for seed stage firms. As of August 2019, iSME’s co-investment fund has invested $10.23 million across 22 investments and has been able to leverage $25.47 million in co-financing, demonstrating its ability to crowd in private sector financing and expand the market for early stage equity finance in Lebanon. To date, 60 out of 174 grantees had leveraged the iSME funding to raise a total of $13.1 million from various funding sources, a leverage ratio of 5.3 times. Overall, stakeholders’ consultations suggest that the iSME project could play an even larger role in the future financing of the Venture Capital (VC) sector by supporting existing VCs and emerging players, including increasing attention on a fund of funds approach, which could also cover growth funds (later stage and private equity).

In India, our MSME Growth, Innovation and Inclusive Finance Project improved access to finance for MSMEs in three vital but underserved segments: early stage/startups, services, and manufacturing. A credit line of $500 million, provided to the Small Industry Development Bank of India (SIDBI), was designed to provide an affordable longer-term source of funding for underserved MSMEs. Technical assistance of about $3.7 million complemented the lending component and focused on capacity building of SIDBI and the participating financial institutions (PFIs). In addition to directly financing MSMEs, disbursing a total of $265 million in loans, the project pushed the frontiers of MSME financing through the development of innovative lending methods that reduced turnaround time, reached more underserved MSMEs, and crowded in more private sector financing. It also reached new clients, women-owned MSMEs, and MSMEs in low-income states. The project supported SIDBI to scale-up of the Fund of Funds for Startups, which aims to indirectly disburse $1.5 billion to startups by 2025.

Name: Umeh Chinaza Lucy
Reg no: 2018/246901
Course code: Eco 362
Department: Education Economics
Assignment
Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

DISCUSSION

Firstly, The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects.
The world bank led by Robert McNamara in 1973 and 1980 as the significant actor was to address social welfare in developing country. In his sense of vision it was of vital importance For the world bank to work with the government to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although the project lending was directed towards the development of infrastructure, industry and agriculture still continued, The program that was introduced during Robert McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The world bank loaned large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the population.

Inconcluson Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success co
untries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.

McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

NAME – CHIDOZIE JULIETH CHISOM
REG NO – 2018/250055
DEPARTMENT – EDUCATION ECONOMICS
Course code -Eco 362
Email – chidoziejulieth165@gmail.com

ANSWER:
By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978). These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development that we know today.
Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold between 1968 and 1981, and expanded into new sectors: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, and others. The global effort to eradicate river blindness is one example of how the Bank worked to improve the lives of the poor, which was different from the large infrastructure projects that were done in the Bank’s first 20 y ears
The ambitious objective of McNamara was to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of this century” (i. e. 2000). This goal is possible if the courageous decisions are made.
he emphasized that “eradicating poverty means in practice the elimination of malnutrition and illiteracy, the reduction of infant mortality, and the raising of life-expectancy standards to those of the developed nations.”
But due to unequal distribution, even if rapid economic expansion in the developing world continues, this doesn’t mean that everyone will automatically benefit from the development process.
But McNamara had already noticed, in 1973, that “despite a decade of unprecedented increase in the gross national product of the developing countries, the poorest segments of their population have received relatively little benefit (because) rapid growth has been accompanied by greater maldistribution of income in many developing countries.”
The role that the richer nations would not turn away from, was clearly spelled out forty years ago. McNamara said then: “If the governments of the developing world who must measure the risks of reform against the risks of revolution – are prepared to exercise the requisite political will to assault the problem of poverty in the countryside, then the governments of the wealthy nations must display equal courage. They must be prepared to help them by removing discriminatory trade barriers and by substantially expanding Official Development Assistance.”
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.
McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health.
McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

Name: Ogbonnaya Geraldine Ugochi
Department: Economics
Registration Number: 2018/241833
Course title: Development Economics ||
Course code: ECO 362

ASSIGNMENT

McNamara’s arrival to the World Bank presidency profoundly marked its history. Evoking the connection between security and development, McNamara stated that economic backwardness and the contradictions of modernization opened the doors to ideological radicals. For that reason, “without internal development, at least to a minimum level, order and stability are impossible”. This approach was related to Washington`s recognition of the failure of its predominantly military approach followed in Vietnam. This explains the US government’s emphasis on the increase of multilateral aid over bilateral aid, since according to Washington, the WB and the other MDBs could raise funds and make loans to peripheral countries geopolitically relevant to the US, without attracting direct criticism of its foreign policy and without the economic burden of bilateral programs. Assuming the position, McNamara stated that the balance of the ‘dec-ade of development’ was “disappointing” because income inequality among states had increased and the majority of the population of the planet lived in extreme conditions, despite the increase of rates of economic growth in large parts of the world. All this im-plied the recognition that the benefits of growth had not flowed downwards, as ‘trickle-down’ doctrine preached. According to McNamara, it was no longer valid to suppose that growth would necessarily lead to the reduction of poverty. It was necessary to distinguish them conceptually and to approach them in a separate and direct manner. On the other hand, McNamara denied that the reduction of poverty would occur at the cost of growth as the immense majority of economists (inside and outside the World Bank) at that time stated, insisting on its centrality. The slogan of the ‘assault on poverty’ was at the core of the new administration’s discourse. In its name, the McNamara administration more than doubled the loan portfolio. There was a considerable expansion of loans to the agricultural sector and, to a lesser degree, for social ‘purposes,’ such as education, basic sanitation, nutrition, urban hous-ing, and family planning. Although disbursements for Asia were intensified, operations in Africa and Latin America proportionally increased more. McNamara established annual loan targets for each country and defined that each employee’s professional efficiency would be assessed according to the volume of funds involved in projects for which they were responsible. Thus, the imperative of ‘moving the money’ at any cost became one of the most striking marks of the organizational culture of the World Bank.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
The McNamara administration was also engaged in the search for an instrument replicable in the urban environment. The first World Bank projects in 1972 continued the focus on sites and services, whose objective was to balance maximum cost recovery with minimum subsidy. The basic procedure consisted of limiting subsidies for land purchases and the construction of basic infrastructure to the minimum possible, leaving the new owners responsible for constructing houses and a large part of the costs. This focus provided a means to exploit unpaid labor, lowering the reproduction costs of the labor force and feeding social conformism through access to property. Following this, there emerged the focus on slum upgrading, which demanded the minimum physical demolition and resettlement of people, with the advantage of fully serving the canonization the slum habit with the discourse of ‘helping the poor help themselves’ and the incremental illusion of ‘build-it-yourself’. The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
Placed at the center of the World Bank research was the question of poverty. Until then, poverty had been practically ignored as a theoretical question in the economic literature, appearing in a vague manner, frequently associated with benefits and welfarism. For Washington and McNamara, the reduction of poverty in the Third World was linked to the fight against communism and to the improvement of US security, conceived as a condition for the “free world’s” security. The slogan of the ‘fight against poverty’ actually configured a limited and conservative response to a myriad of social complaints. With direct roots in the injunctions of the Cold War and grafted on to the Bank by Washington, the ‘assault on poverty,’ however, lacked two important elements in those years: a theory, and a means that could be replicated and assessed. In effect, the World Bank lacked a response which could give coherence, both internally and externally, to the projects which the institution had been implementing in agriculture, education, and urban housing, and also did not have an instrument which could allow the measurement of results.
Nevertheless, for the World Bank the most important consequence of basic necessities was the consecration of health and education as priority and fundable areas, linking them to the fight against poverty and the reconfiguration of social policies. At the end of 1979, the institution began to authorize loans exclusively for health. What balance can be made of McNamara’s crusade against poverty’? First, World Bank loans for projects with some ‘poverty oriented’ component (not necessarily the principal) officially did not rise above one third of the total. However, this figure is overestimated, as staff exaggerated the level of project coverage, increasing the number of beneficiaries considered poor, since professional ascension depended on the volume of loan under the supervision of each employee. Second, when compared to the magnitude of investment made by states for development, World Bank loans were always derisory. In fact, the impact of the organization’s actions concentrated on the formation of ideas and practices related to economic and social administration. From this perspective, funding was more important as a lever to induce changes in public expenditure and public policies. In many cases, public administration agencies responsible for the regulation of entire sectors of the economy were built with loans and/or technical assistance from the World Bank.

Name: Onyeabo Michael Chukwuebuka
Reg No: 2018/248280

Many policymakers realized in the 1960s that the trickle-down approach to development was not improving the lives of the poor.

As the rich became richer and the poor became poorer as a result of the unequal distribution of wealth, the World Bank shifted from project lending to program lending to ensure growth with equity. The World Bank, in collaboration with developing-country governments, launched a social program aimed at improving housing, education, health, energy, and transportation.

Between 1973 and 1980, the then-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Robert McNamara, was a driving force in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. McNamara believed it was critical for the World Bank to collaborate with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing countries through financial and technical assistance from the World Bank and developing countries. During McNamara, the World Bank lends large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and small-scale industry development. This effort aimed to provide for a country’s impoverished and under-employed population.

However, the program was not a full success.

Name : Adigwe ifeoma Favour
Reg no : 2018/241871
Department : Economics department

Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics and excelling in his studies. His personal experiences during the Great Depression and the liberal outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. He enrolled in the Harvard Business School in 1937 and it was here that he acquired the management techniques that became characteristic of his leadership style. The concept of management based on the accumulation and analysis of quantitative data appealed to his disciplined mind and provided him with a tool for exercising control in uncertain conditions.
McNamara, President of the World Bank, reported on the Bank’s operations in fiscal year 1972 and reviewed the progress of the Five-Year Program for 1969–73. He assessed the current state of development in member countries and outlined the program for the five years 1974–78.

Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

Role of the World Bank

The World Bank is an international development organization owned by 187 countries. Its role is to reduce poverty by lending money to the governments of its poorer members to improve their economies and to improve the standard of living of their people.
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

Enlarging the Bank
McNamara was never constrained by the Bank’s tradition of financial prudence. He felt that the daunting problems faced by the world required daring and risk-taking. Upon his arrival at the Bank, McNamara was surprised at what he considered the small volume of lending the Bank had made compared to the vastness of the needs. He developed an elaborate system of numerical reporting tables that provide complete and up-to-date pictures of the lending program and country needs: the Bank’s balance sheet, cash flow, lending program, and borrowing requirements. These reporting methods grew progressively more complex as McNamara insisted that more data be included in the reports.

Name : Onuigbo Chidimma
Department : Education/Economic
Reg num : 2019/249019
Assignment
Development in 1960s and 70s and World Bank lending
Answers
Development is an act of bringing new things into existence, it’s a continuous process.
Development since 1960 to 70s
In the 1960s, membership in the UN continued to expand and issues of development came to the attention of the international community through actions both within and outside of the UN. Some of the key UN resolutions, reports and events are highlighted.

As the introduction to the Secretary-General’s report on Proposals for Action (E/3613 + Corr.2) states,

“At the opening of the United Nations development decade, we are beginning to understand the real aims of development and the nature of the development process. We are learning that development concerns not only man’s material needs, but also the improvement of the social conditions of his life and his broad human aspirations. Development is not just economic growth, it is growth plus change.”

During this time, the practice of calling for international observances, such as international days, years and decades, grew as a practice to highlight development issues and concerns.

Key events, documents and resolutions, 1960-1970
Decades:

1960-1970: First United Nations Development Decade: A/RES/1710 (XVI)
1960

Second Conference on the Law of the Sea
Geneva, 17 Mar.-26 Apr. 1960
Report: A/CONF.19/8 (Vol. I & II) (60.V.6)
1961

Dag Hammarskjöld died in office
U Thant appointed Secretary-General
International Health and Medical Research Year: A/RES/1283 (XIII)
World Food Programme (WFP) established
Specialized Agency agreement with International Development Association (IDA, part of the World Bank Group)
UN Conference on New Sources of Energy
Rome, 21-31 Aug. 1961
Report: E/3577/Rev.1-ST/ECA/72 (62.I.21)
1962

Economic and social consequences of disarmament : report of the Secretary-General transmitting the study of his Consultative Group (E/3593/Rev.1; 62.IX.1)
The United Nations Development Decade : Proposals for Action : Report of the Secretary-General (E/3613 + Corr.2; 62.II.B.2)
1963

Joint Declaration of the Developing Countries made at the 18th session of the General Assembly, 11 November 1963
First action by the Group of 75 (became G-77)
A/RES/1897 (XVIII) Annex
1964:

UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) established
23 March – 16 June 1964, First session of UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD I)
E/CONF.46/141 (Vol. I): Final Act and Report
E/CONF.46/141 (Vol. II): Policy Statements
G-77 Joint Declaration of 15 June 1964 included in the Final Act and Report, page 66-68
Towards a New Trade Policy for Development : Report by the Secretary-General of the UN Conference on Trade and Development
Known as the Prebisch Report
E/CONF.46/3
See CEPAL’s guide on Raul Prebisch for additional information
1965

International Cooperation Year: A/RES/1907 (XVIII)
World Population Conference (2nd)
Belgrade, 30 Aug.-10 Sept. 1965
Report
Vol. I: E/CONF.41/2 (66.XIII.5) Summary Report
Vol. II: E/CONF.41/3 (66.XIII.6) Fertility, Family Planning, Mortality
Vol. III: E/CONF.41/4 (66.XIII.7) Projections, Measurement of Population Trends
Vol. IV: E/CONF.41/5 (66.XIII.8) Migration, Urbanization, Economic Development
Council Membership increases, in accordance with A/RES/1991 (XVIII)
UN Security Council: from 11 to 15
Economic and Social Council: from 18 to 27
A/RES/2029 (XX): Consolidation of the Special Fund and the Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance in a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
A/RES/2106 (XX): International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination
Procedural history for the ICERD
1966

A/RES/2186 (XXI): Establishment of the United Nations Capital Development Fund
A/RES/2200 (XXI): International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
Procedural history for the ICESCR
Procedural history for the ICCPR
1967

International Tourist Year: A/RES/2148 (XXI)
A/RES/2188 (XXI): General review of the programmes and activities in the economic, social, technical cooperation and related fields of the United Nations, the specialized agencies, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations Children’s Fund and all other institutions and agencies related to the United Nations system
1968

International Year for Human Rights: A/RES/2081 (XX)
International Conference on Human Rights
Tehran, 22 Apr. – 13 May 1968
Final Act: A/CONF.32/41 (68.XIV.2)
Procedural History from the Audiovisual Library of International Law
UNCTAD II
New Delhi, 1 Feb.-29 Mar. 1968
TD/97 Vol. I: Report and Annexes: TD/97 + Corr.1 + 3 (68.II.D.14)
TD/97 Vol. II: Commodity Problems and Policies (68.II.D.15)
1969

Partners in development : Report of the Commission on International Development
Commission financed by the World Bank
Known as the Pearson Commission, after Chairman Lester B. Pearson
DHL call number: IBRD (02) C734 (English, French, Spanish)
Study of the Capacity of the UN Development System
Called for by the Governing Council of UNDP
Known as the Capacity Study or Jackson Report
DP/5 Vol.I & Vol. II
A/RES/2411 (XXIII): International Development Strategy
1970

International Education Year: A/RES/2306 (XXII), A/RES/2412 (XXIII)

Name: Isiguzo Purity Ezinne
Reg. No: 2018/242353
Email address: isipurity4real@gmail.com
Course code: Eco 362

ANSWER

The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries.

Robert Strange McNamara, born in Oakland, California on the 9th of June, 1916 served as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries.

The World Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded.

It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he (McNamara) set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power.

McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

The past 70 years have seen major changes in the world economy. Over that time, the World Bank Group—the world’s largest development institution—has worked to help more than 100 developing countries and countries in transition adjust to these changes by offering loans and tailored knowledge and advice.

The Bank Group works with country governments, the private sector, civil society organizations, regional development banks, think tanks, and other international institutions on issues ranging from climate change, conflict, and food security to education, agriculture, finance, and trade.

All of these efforts support the Bank Group’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity of the poorest 40 percent of the population in all countries.

Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions.

Its loans helped European countries rebuild after World War II. That made it the world’s first multilateral development bank. It was funded through the sale of bonds.  Its first loans were to France and other European countries

In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads.

With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal.

Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery.

One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.

McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974.

McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.

He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.

Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.

McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing.

He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

Today the Bank Group’s work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of people’s lives in developing countries.

The Bank Group has long-standing relationships with more than 180 member countries, and it taps these to address development challenges that are increasingly global.

On critical issues like climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, the Bank Group plays a leading role because it is able to convene discussion among its country members and a wide array of partners. It can help address crises while building the foundations for longer-term, sustainable development.

As demand for its services has increased over time, the Bank Group has risen to meet them. For perspective, the World Bank made four loans totaling $497 million in 1947, as compared to 302 commitments totaling $60 billion in 2015.

Stephen Ifessy Precious
2018/244261
Education/Economics
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
McNamara oversaw a fundamental shift in the Bank Group’s mission from a lender for reconstruction and development to guiding government policies and serving the poor. He steered the institution through the end of the post-WWII era, the 1970s Oil Crisis, and a significant increase in staff and lending, while imparting a new vision focused on the alleviation of extreme poverty. His shifting of the Bank Group’s policies on population and health, social and rural development, program lending, and other areas reverberate through the institution 40 years later.
The Bank’s stated purpose is to “bridge the economic divide between poor and rich countries.” It does this by turning “rich country resources into poor country growth.” It has a long-term vision to “achieve sustainable poverty reduction.”
War on Poverty
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.
From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.
McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.
Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

To achieve this goal, the Bank focuses on several areas:
1. Overcome poverty by spurring growth, especially in Africa.
2. Help reconstruct countries emerging from war, the biggest cause of extreme poverty.
3. Provide a customized solution to help middle-income countries remain out of poverty.
4. Spur governments to prevent climate change.
5. Work with partners to bring an end to AIDS.
6. Manage international financial crises and promote open trade.
7. Work with the Arab League on three goals: improve education, build infrastructure, and provide microloans to small businesses.
From 1974 to 1980 the bank concentrated on meeting the basic needs of people in the developing world. The size and number of loans to borrowers greatly increased, as loan targets expanded from infrastructure into social services and other sectors.
These changes can be attributed to Robert McNamara. McNamara implored bank treasurer Eugene Rotberg to seek out new sources of capital outside of the northern banks that had been the primary sources of funding. Rotberg used the global bond market to increase the capital available to the bank. One consequence of the period of poverty alleviation lending was the rapid rise of Third World debt. From 1976 to 1980, developing world debt rose at an average annual rate of 20%.

NAME: OYIBE, EBERE IZUINYA
REG. NO: 2018/245131
DEPARTMENT: ECONOMICS
COURSE: ECO 362
E-mail: ebereoyibe@gmail.com

Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley majoring in economics. His personal experiences during the great depression and the liberal Outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. In 1937, he did management courses in Harvard Business School where he acquired the management techniques that became the characteristics of his leadership style.
McNamara applied his management style in the military during world war 11 and in a private industry (Ford Motor Company). In 1960, he was appointed president of Ford Motor Company but after one month, he was called to the new Kennedy administration to serve as a secretary of Defense with a mandate to bring the military under control through the application of efficient management. He was later nominated the next president of Word Bank to serve as the 5th president.
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.

McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.

McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

MCNAMARA’S FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY.
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.
From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.
McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.

Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.

McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

Name: Nwajuagu Divine Ndubuisi
Reg no: 2018/248278
Email: nwajuagudivine22@gmail.com

Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations.  Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold. After this rural development became the next focus. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.
McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.
The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.

Name: Ik-Ukennaya Ezekiel
Reg. No: 2018/ 249 788
Department: Economics
Email : ezekielikukennaya4@gmail.com

Eco. 362 (Online Discussion/Quiz 14-01-2022–Development in 1960s and 70s and World Bank Lending)
Question:
Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programs that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

Answer:
The world Bank, led by Robert McNamara between 1973 and 1980, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing nations. This is in-line with program lending initiative which reflects the World Bank shift from project lending to achieve” Growth with Equity” in developing countries. In the 1960s, many policy makers found out that the trickle-down approach to development of project lending was not improving the lives of the poor. Some of them believed that the benefits of project lending were trickling- up instead of trickling- down. Because of the obvious faulty distribution of wealth, the World Bank in collaboration with governments of developing countries established social programs intended to directly address poverty. These programs aimed at improving housing, education, health, energy and transportation to directly improve the lives of the impoverished.
In the view of McNamara, it was imperative for World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. He helped the governments of developing countries to implement state- run programs aimed at improving the lot of the nation’s citizens through financial and technical assistance from World Bank and developed nations.
Although project lending aimed at development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty to reflect the “Growth with Equity” initiative. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development and development of small scale industry. The Bank loans were also used to develop programs for the improvement of health, nutrition, family planning and educational services because these projects help to eradicate absolute poverty in developing countries as they help to improve the welfare of the poor.

BETWEEN 1973 and 1980

Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.

McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.

McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

The World Bank promotes long-term economic development and poverty reduction by providing technical and financial support to help countries reform certain sectors or implement specific projects—such as building schools and health centers, providing water and electricity, fighting disease, and protecting the environment .

The Work Bank help developing countries achieve sustainable growth by financing investment, mobilizing capital in international financial markets, and providing advisory services to businesses and governments.

Sustainable urban and rural development is about improving the quality of life in a locality, including ecological, cultural, political, institutional, social and economic components without leaving any burden e.g the result of a reduced natural capital and an excessive local debt—on future generations.

Role of Small and medium scale enterprises are to help the government in increasing infrastructures and manufacturing industries, reducing issues like pollution, slums, poverty, and many development acts. Small scale manufacturing industries and cottage industries play a very important role in the economic development of developing countries.

These are some of the reasons why the World Bank assist these Rural development, Urban development and development of small scale industry.

NAME: UNADIKE FABIAN CHINEMEZU
REG NO: 2018/249698
DEPARTMENT: ECONOMICS
COURSE CODE: ECO 362

QUESTION
Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

ANSWER
Robert S. McNamara(1916 – 2009) was the 5th President of the World Bank Group, 1968 – 1981.
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

THE WORLD BANK:
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects.
With 189 member countries, staff from more than 170 countries, and offices in over 130 locations, the World Bank Group is a unique global partnership: five institutions working for sustainable solutions that reduce poverty and build shared prosperity in developing countries.
Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions. Originally, its loans helped rebuild countries devastated by World War II. In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads. With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal. The subsequent launch of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency further rounded out the Bank Group’s ability to connect global financial resources to the needs of developing countries.
Today the Bank Group’s work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of people’s lives in developing countries. While sound project selection and design remain paramount, the Bank Group recognizes a wide range of factors that are critical to success—effective institutions, sound policies, continuous learning through evaluation and knowledge-sharing, and partnership, including with the private sector. The Bank Group has long-standing relationships with more than 180 member countries, and it taps these to address development challenges that are increasingly global. On critical issues like climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, the Bank Group plays a leading role because it is able to convene discussion among its country members and a wide array of partners. It can help address crises while building the foundations for longer-term, sustainable development.
The evolution of the Bank Group has also been reflected in the diversity of its multidisciplinary staff, who include economists, public policy experts, sector experts, and social scientists, based at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in the field. Today, more than a third of staff are based in country offices.
As demand for its services has increased over time, the Bank Group has risen to meet them. For perspective, the World Bank made four loans totaling $497 million in 1947, as compared to 302 commitments totaling $60 billion in 2015.

Name: Isiguzo Purity Ezinne
Reg. No: 2018/242353
Email address: isipurity4real@gmail.com
Course code: Eco 362

ANSWER

The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries.

Robert Strange McNamara, born in Oakland, California on the 9th of June, 1916 served as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries.

The World Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded.

It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he (McNamara) set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power.

McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

McNamara believed that the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

The past 70 years have seen major changes in the world economy. Over that time, the World Bank Group—the world’s largest development institution—has worked to help more than 100 developing countries and countries in transition adjust to these changes by offering loans and tailored knowledge and advice.

The Bank Group works with country governments, the private sector, civil society organizations, regional development banks, think tanks, and other international institutions on issues ranging from climate change, conflict, and food security to education, agriculture, finance, and trade.

All of these efforts support the Bank Group’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity of the poorest 40 percent of the population in all countries.

Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions.

Its loans helped European countries rebuild after World War II. That made it the world’s first multilateral development bank. It was funded through the sale of bonds.  Its first loans were to France and other European countries

In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads.

With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal.

Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery.

One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.

McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974.

McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.

He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.

Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.

McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing.

He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

Today the Bank Group’s work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of people’s lives in developing countries.

The Bank Group has long-standing relationships with more than 180 member countries, and it taps these to address development challenges that are increasingly global.

On critical issues like climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, the Bank Group plays a leading role because it is able to convene discussion among its country members and a wide array of partners. It can help address crises while building the foundations for longer-term, sustainable development.

As demand for its services has increased over time, the Bank Group has risen to meet them. For perspective, the World Bank made four loans totaling $497 million in 1947, as compared to 302 commitments totaling $60 billion in 2015.

JOSEPH RUTH TOCHUKWU
2018/245132
ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT

ASSIGNMENT ON ECO 362

In the 1960s,many policymakers realized that the trickle down approach to development was not improving the circumstances of the poor. In fact, some believe that the benefits were trickling up.
Because of the very obvious maldistribution of wealth, the world bank in conjunction with governments in less developed countries established social programs intended to directly address poverty. These programs were aimed at improving housing, eduation,health,energy and transportation.
Between1973 and 1980,the world Bank led by Robert McNamara became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in less developed countries. In his view, it was imperative(in light of the cold war) for the world bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in less developed countries. With financial and technical assistance from world bank and developed nations,the governments of less developed countries implemented state run program aimed at improving the lot of their nations citizens.
Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry and Agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty.
The world bank lent large sums to aid rural development, urban development and development of small scale industry. Bank loans also helped to develop programs for the improvement of health,nutrition, family planning and educational services.
The aim of this effort was to provide for the impoverished and underemployed sectors of the population in a country.

Name: Omeke Chinenye Joy
Reg. No.: 2018/244290
Department: Social Science Education [Education Economics]
Eco. 362 (Online Discussion/Quiz 14-01-2022–Development in 1960s and 70s and World Bank Lending)
Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss
Answer
The world Bank confronts poverty
The World Bank was a result of the conference held at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in 1944 known as the Bretton Woods Conference. While the conference resulted in the formation of two institutions: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank), the creation of the World Bank was not the primary focus rather the aim was to create the framework for post-war international economic cooperation and reconstruction.
On April 1, 1968, Robert S. McNamara became president of the World Bank. During his long tenure (ending June 1981), he transformed the bank by moving poverty reduction to center stage. He sought to redefine the bank as a bona fide “development agency” and not just a financial institution and was a forceful agent of change. His arrival coincided with a shift in academic thinking and research about development. This shift began when orthodox views of development focusing on economic growth—were questioned, and studies found that physical capital played a smaller-than-expected role in economic growth. Moreover, it appeared that a “residual factor” existed in macroeconomic statistical models. This residual factor was believed to be investment in education, innovation, entrepreneurship, and later, health. The concepts of “human capital” and “human development”—investments in people also gained acceptance. The basic needs approach to development influenced the way academics and policymakers viewed development, later forming the cornerstone of the US Agency for International Development program.
Moreover, internal bank studies and country mission reports revealed that hundreds of millions of people in developing countries were living in extreme poverty and lacking health clinics, primary and secondary schools, and safe drinking water. Such conditions of “underdevelopment” were key barriers to productivity, economic growth, and poverty reduction, and poverty was a direct result of insufficient investments in health and education.
The bank’s gradual shift toward more social sector lending began with an emphasis on population control, which McNamara regarded as the first step to alleviating poverty. In a landmark speech at the University of Notre Dame in 1969, he urged the international community to address population growth, the “most delicate and difficult issue of any era in history.” Population control was a major focus for other development agencies at the time, particularly the Ford Foundation and US Agency for International Development. By 1970, McNamara had established the Population Projects Department in the World Bank and continued to advocate population control in speeches and dialogue with governments. On August 26, 1974, the report Population Policies and Economic Development, which analyzed the effect of rising populations on poverty, was published. However, population control failed to develop into a strong lending program, perhaps because it could not meet the bank’s interest in projects that were both acceptable to borrowers and attractive to bank shareholders.
By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978).
Since 1970, McNamara had been advocating bank support for health and nutrition programs, as in speeches at Columbia University (1970) and the bank’s annual general meetings (1972). In June 1973, he requested a health policy paper from bank staff. The resulting 1975 Health Sector Policy Paper was one of the bank’s first efforts to generate and disseminate knowledge on health policy issues. In 1974, one of the bank’s most successful programs, the Onchocerciasis Control Program (OCP), was created to eliminate onchocerciasis (river blindness) and enhance country and regional control of the disease. This health initiative involved 11 countries in West Africa and was sponsored, along with the World Bank, by United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization, and WHO. It also involved the private sector and non-governmental organizations. Onchocerciasis is caused by a parasitic worm and is spread by black flies that breed in fast-flowing water. The group determined they could stop flies from transmitting the disease by treating the water flow. The OCP also established a program of insecticide application to prevent the growth of black flies.
Under his leadership also, the bank formulated the concept of “sustainable development,” which attempted to reconcile economic growth and environmental protection in developing countries. Another feature of the concept was the use of capital flows (in the form of development assistance and foreign investment) to developing countries as a means of narrowing the income gap between rich and poor countries. The World Bank added another institution to the group when the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA) was formed in 1988 to provide political risk insurance and credit enhancement to investors and lenders. The bank has expanded its lending activities and, with its numerous research and policy divisions, has developed into a powerful and authoritative intergovernmental body.
Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold between 1968 and 1981, and expanded into new sectors: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, and others. The first loan for the environment was in 1971 for pollution control in Brazil, and the Bank subsequently built environmental safeguards into its process. During the 1970s economists were the primary advisers in the Bank, but staff with different skills in anthropology, sociology, environmental science and other sectors were hired to provide even more expertise to clients.
In the wake of the debt crisis of the early 1980s, the World Bank focused its efforts on providing financial assistance in the form of balance-of-payments support and loans for infrastructural projects such as roads, port facilities, schools, and hospitals. Although emphasizing poverty alleviation and debt relief for the world’s least developed countries, the bank has retained its commitment to economic stabilization policies that require the implementation of austerity measures by recipient countries.
REFERENCES
The Changing role of World Bank in Global Health. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1449852/
The world Bank international organization. Retrieved from: https://www.britannica.com/topic/World-Bank
https://www.worldbank.org/en/archive/history

The bank loans helped to develop programs for the improvement of health , nutrition, family planning, and educational services. the aim of this effort was to provide for the impoverished and underemployed sector of the population in a country.

It meant that Bank loans also helped to develop programs for the improvement of health,nutriton, family planning, and educational services. the aim of this effort was to provide for the impoverished and under-employed sectos of the population in a country. to help them develope and improve their economy.

Name: Nnadebe Jane Amarachi
Reg no:,2018/241863
Depatment: Economics.

The World Bank is an international organization that helps emerging market countries to reduce poverty. Its first goal is to end extreme poverty. It wants no more than 3% of people to live on $1.90 a day or less by 2030. Its second goal is to promote shared prosperity.
The Bank’s stated purpose is to “bridge the economic divide between poor and rich countries.” It does this by turning “rich country resources into poor country growth.” It has a long-term vision to “achieve sustainable poverty reduction.”

To achieve this goal, the Bank focuses on several areas:

Overcome poverty by spurring growth, especially in Africa.
Help reconstruct countries emerging from war, the biggest cause of extreme poverty.
Provide a customized solution to help middle-income countries remain out of poverty.

Spur governments to prevent climate change.
Work with partners to bring an end to AIDS.

Manage international financial crises and promote open trade.

By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978). These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development that we know today.

Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold between 1968 and 1981, and expanded into new sectors: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, and others. The global effort to eradicate river blindness is one example of how the Bank worked to improve the lives of the poor, which was different from the large infrastructure projects that were done in the Bank’s first 20 y ears. The first loan for the environment was in 1971 for pollution control in Brazil, and the Bank subsequently built environmental safeguards into its process. During the 1970s economists were the primary advisers in the Bank, but staff with different skills in anthropology, sociology, environmental science and other sectors were hired to provide even more expertise to clients.

The 1980s and 90s brought additional challenges related to oil shocks, debt crises and environmentalism, and the Bank reacted by bringing new skills and safeguards into its work, as well as structural adjustment. Structural adjustment loans came with policy conditions, such as fiscal discipline, tax reform and liberalization of foreign direct investment; but while they were intended to improve the policy and institutional environment in which the loans were made, their overall effectiveness was debated internally and in the client community.

To the world bank,Poverty is a complex problem that must be addressed at all levels of society. The Bank’s poverty reduction experts work within many areas and programs to meet our goals. Here are some of the key areas we focus on.

Climate change

Climate change is expected to hit developing countries the hardest. Higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, rising sea levels, and more frequent weather-related disasters pose risks for agriculture, food, and water supplies. At stake are recent gains in the fight against poverty, hunger and disease, and the lives and livelihood of billions of people in developing countries.

Community-driven development

Community-driven development programs encourage villages, urban neighborhoods, or other household groups to managing their own development resources. It is a bottoms-up approach to development that seeks to give communities and local governments control over planning and investments. Community-based development efforts have had mixed results.

Disaster risk management

Natural disasters push people into poverty and make the poor even poorer. Before the 2004 Asian tsunami, for example, about one-third of the population in some coastal regions of Indonesia lived in poverty. After the disaster, nearly half of the population in those regions existed below the poverty line and depended on food aid. Cost-effective risk reduction programs, such as early warning systems, better building codes and emergency preparedness strategies are the best defense against future catastrophes, and for quick recovery.

Education

Education is a powerful driver of development and one of the strongest instruments for reducing poverty and improving health, gender equality, peace, and stability. There has been great progress in the last decade; many more children attend schools and girls’ education has improved. Still, many low-income countries remain off track to meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goals for education. Even when children complete school, they often do so without acquiring basic knowledge and skills. This can perpetuate the cycle of poverty, especially when labor markets demand a more skilled and agile work force than ever before.

Energy

More than 1.3 billion people live without electricity, hampering their ability to study, become entrepreneurs, work and connect with the outside world. About 3 billion people use solid fuels — wood, charcoal, coal, and dung — for cooking and heating, with serious health implications, especially for women and children. $40 billion in new capital investment per year is needed so that the energy poor can have environmentally sustainable energy services by 2030. This is in addition to annual operating costs of about $450 billion just to sustain energy services at current levels. So bringing environmentally sustainable energy to all is a tall order, but essential for poverty reduction and social inclusion.

McNamara did not see private capital as a realistic option in addressing critical development needs. But his reliance upon government intervention sometimes meant turning a blind eye to coercive practices – the involuntary collectivization of farmers in Tanzania, for example – and could lead the Bank to ignore the inefficiency and economic cost of government policies.

NAME: JULIUS LOVETH OLACHI
REG NO: 2018/242294
DEPT: ECONOMICS

Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace.

For the first two decades following World War II, the bulk of World Bank lending was used to finance the building of infrastructure related to energy and transportation, as much of Europe’s infrastructure had been destroyed. Rising pressure to increase the flow of funds to poorer nations, following the economic recovery of Europe, led to a similar pattern of investment in developing countries.
By the late 1960s, when Robert McNamara
became its president, for the first time the Bank began
to direct its attention to poverty reduction and so to
put a priority on rural development. By the late 1960s, when Robert McNamara
became its president, for the first time the Bank began to direct its attention to poverty reduction and so to put a priority on rural development.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

To alleviate poverty, He focused on key areas such as:
a.) Education
b.) Community driven development
c.) Microfinance
d.) Hunger,etc .
the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
(PRSP) approach was introduced jointly with the IMF.
Although intended to improve on this experience, it remained very uneven, most obviously because of its weak connection to actual budgets. However, debt burdens did begin to decrease in Africa during the 2000s through various initiatives. The Bank was sometimes criticized in this period for placing too little emphasis on government institutions for fostering development such as coordination and industrial policy.

Economic growth slowed down in all parts of the world during the second half of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s.After almost three decades of remarkable progress since the end of the Second World War, economic conditions started to deteriorate in the 1970s. Before the oil price shock of 1973, the annual growth of world gross product had been at 5.3 per cent, while during the rest of the 1970s, annual world growth reached only 2.8 per cent.By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” . These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development.

Over time, the World Bank Group—the world’s largest development institution—has worked to help more than 100 developing countries and countries in transition adjust to these changes by offering loans and tailored knowledge and advice. The Bank works with country governments, the private sector, civil society organizations, regional development banks, think tanks, and other international institutions on issues ranging from climate change, conflict, and food security to education, agriculture, finance, and trade. The global effort to eradicate river blindness is one example of how the Bank worked to improve the lives of the poor, All of these efforts support the Bank Group’s twin goals of ending extreme poverty by 2030 and boosting shared prosperity of the poorest 40 percent of the population in all countries.

Name: Eze Ugochukwu Ethel
Dept: Social Science Education (Education Economics)
Reg.no: 2018)245419
By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: ” to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978). These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development that we know today. Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold between 1968 and 1981, and expanded into new sectors: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, and others. The global effort to eradicate river blindness is one example of how the Bank worked to improve the lives of the poor, which was different from the large infrastructure projects that were done in the Bank’s first 20 years. The first loan for the environment was in 1971 for pollution control in Brazil, and the Bank subsequently built environmental safeguards into its process. During the 1970s economists were the primary advisers in the Bank, but staff with different skills in anthropology, sociology, environmental science and other sectors were hired to provide even more expertise to clients.
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues.
From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.
McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

NAME: OBELEZE CHRISTIANTUS IFEANYI
REG NO: 2018/242407
EMAIL: OBELEZECHRISTIANTUS@GMAIL.COM
QUESTION
Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant factor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss?
ANSWER
Robert McNamara, who was the President of the World Bank, gave a speech to the Bank’s Board of Governors in 1973 in Nairobi, he emphasized the alarming situation of the absolute poor in the developing world and proposed a rigorous approach to fight this poverty. The strategy he outlined for this poverty reduction or elimination was to be centered on an integrated approach to rural development. The World Bank therefore vigorously championed the cause of rural development in the 1970s defining rural development as: “a strategy designed to improve the economic and social life of a specific group of people- the rural poor. It involves extending the benefits of development to the poorest among those who seek a livelihood in the rural areas. The group includes small-scale farmers, tenants and landless” (World Bank, 1975). Following McNamara’s 1973 speech, the World Bank adopted a rural development strategy in 1975 (World Bank, 1975) which was a major element not only in the Bank’s poverty alleviation initiative, playing a dominant role in its lending during the 1970s and 1980s, but influenced in a major way other donor support for agriculture and rural development. Governments and donors saw rural development as a strategy to improve the economic and social life of people in the rural areas, specifically the rural poor. Rural development has therefore been expected to extend the benefits of development to all those seeking a livelihood in rural areas including smallholders, tenants and the landless. Since rural development’s basic intention is to reduce poverty and to strengthen human wellbeing in rural areas, it must clearly be designed not only to promote production and 5 raise productivity to increase food availability and incomes, but also to improve basic services such as health and education as well as infrastructure. The concept of a rural development program therefore is seen as extending beyond any particular activity or single sector. A program of rural development, whether at the area, regional or national level is expected to include a mix of activities including projects or programs to increase agricultural productivity and production, provide employment, improve health, education and infrastructure, expand communications and improve housing. Given the above expectations of rural development programs, it was commonly agreed that a successful rural development program would demand some form of coordinated development at the rural level and therefore this led to the introduction of the concept of integrated rural development (IRD), a model that emphasized coordinating the various sectoral actions of the state at the local level. Because of its nature, IRD became a complex and multisectoral model, the success of which was dependent on the interaction of multiple factors and performance of different entities, whose integration are a necessary prerequisite to effective implementation
The World Bank’s Rural Development Strategy adopted in 1975 seems to have led the way in terms of the main approach to rural development financing. The strategy had a major influence on the Bank’s lending program and operational policies and eventually on the lending approach of other development finance institutions both bilateral and multilateral. The new strategy made the Bank shift the focus of its development efforts towards smallholders. The earlier financing pattern had been one of supporting mostly large-scale agricultural production or plantations, although donors and governments had started financing some smallholder projects in the 1960s, especially those that were export oriented. This change in emphasis by the Bank influenced a similar evolution among other donors and borrowing governments and was a notable achievement of the rural development strategy. In broader terms while the impact of the strategy was appropriate and effective, it was felt more in Asia than in Africa. However rural people in Africa did benefit from rural infrastructure investments, with increases in food production in several countries, and approaches developed to help subsistence farmers. Most of the projects during the decade in the form of integrated rural development projects were often too complex and overwhelmed the weak management capacity of state institutions of a number of African countries, including the parastatals set up to manage them. Many became technocratic and remote from local people’s needs. Programs became dependent on external expertise from donor countries for their design, implementation and management. A number of projects failed due to serious institutional weaknesses, and progress was slowest where most needed—in Sub-Saharan Africa. A lot of the IRD projects therefore achieved disappointing results.
By January 1972, the World Bank report Possible Bank Actions on Malnutrition Problems led to the establishment of a bank nutrition unit. In 1973, Alan Berg’s book The Nutrition Factor and a 1973 nutrition policy paper, which called for a more active role in nutrition, reinforced McNamara’s support for eventual bank lending in that area. However, the bank did not approve its first loan for nutrition (to Brazil for $19 million) until 1976.
Since 1970, McNamara had been advocating bank support of health and nutrition programs, as in speeches at Columbia University (1970) and the bank’s annual general meetings (1972). In June 1973, he requested a health policy paper from bank staff. The resulting 1975 Health Sector Policy Paper was 1 of the bank’s first efforts to generate and disseminate knowledge on health policy issues. In 1974, 1 of the bank’s most successful programs, the Onchocerciasis Control Program (OCP), was created to eliminate onchocerciasis (river blindness) and enhance country and regional control of the disease (Figure 2). This health initiative involved 11 countries in West Africa and was sponsored, along with the World Bank, by United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization, and WHO. It also involved the private sector and nongovernmental organizations.

Because the bank was not notably engaged in health issues at the time, its decision to tackle river blindness was a turning point. The program, which continued for some 30 years, protected an estimated 34 million people from river blindness and cleared nearly 25 million hectares of land for agricultural use. The OCP gave the bank a boost in the health sector. In 1979, the bank established a health department and a policy to consider funding stand-alone health projects, as well as health components in other projects.
These efforts in the health arena were influenced by the growing recognition in academic and policymaking development discourse that the basic needs approach was essential to poverty reduction. McNamara, in particular, engaged with this dialogue. In his 1976 address to the annual general meeting of the board of governors in Manila, the Philippine Islands, he underscored the need to reexamine trickle-down economics and to focus on the unmet basic human needs of hundreds of millions of people in developing countries. Over the ensuing years, he called for further research within the bank before endorsing a full-scale lending program for basic needs.
Despite its failure to become fully institutionalized in World Bank culture and policy, the basic-needs approach laid the foundation for further expansion in the bank’s HNP sector. Official recognition of this shift came most publicly in the World Development Report, 1980 which demonstrated that malnutrition and ill health were 2 of the worst symptoms of poverty and that both could be addressed by direct government action, with bank assistance. The report also suggested that improving health and nutrition would likely accelerate economic growth. After a series of research papers suggested that health and education were directly productive, these findings were incorporated in the World Development Report, 1980 to argue for greater emphases on social sector lending.
Because the bank was not notably engaged in health issues at the time, its decision to tackle river blindness was a turning point. The program, which continued for 30 years, protected an estimated 34 million people from river blindness and cleared 25 million hectares of land for agricultural use.
The bank translated development theory and research into action by creating the Population, Health, and Nutrition Department in October 1979 and allowing stand-alone health loans. A 1980 Health Sector Policy Paper was 1 of the first attempts to provide a rationale for stand-alone investments in the health sector.

WORLD BANK:
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects.
With 189 member countries, staff from more than 170 countries, and offices in over 130 locations, the World Bank Group is a unique global partnership: five institutions working for sustainable solutions that reduce poverty and build shared prosperity in developing countries.
Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions. Originally, its loans helped rebuild countries devastated by World War II. In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads. With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal. The subsequent launch of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency further rounded out the Bank Group’s ability to connect global financial resources to the needs of developing countries.

World bank from ROBERT S. MCNAMARA (the 5th president of the world bank 1968 – 1981)
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty.Today the Bank Group’s work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of people’s lives in developing countries. While sound project selection and design remain paramount, the Bank Group recognizes a wide range of factors that are critical to success—effective institutions, sound policies, continuous learning through evaluation and knowledge-sharing, and partnership, including with the private sector. The Bank Group has long-standing relationships with more than 180 member countries, and it taps these to address development challenges that are increasingly global. On critical issues like climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, the Bank Group plays a leading role because it is able to convene discussion among its country members and a wide array of partners. It can help address crises while building the foundations for longer-term, sustainable development.
The evolution of the Bank Group has also been reflected in the diversity of its multidisciplinary staff, who include economists, public policy experts, sector experts, and social scientists, based at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in the field. Today, more than a third of staff are based in country offices.
As demand for its services has increased over time, the Bank Group has risen to meet them. For perspective, the World Bank made four loans totaling $497 million in 1947, as compared to 302 commitments totaling $60 billion in 2015. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
PERSONAL HISTORY:
Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics and excelling in his studies. His personal experiences during the Great Depression and the liberal outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. He enrolled in the Harvard Business School in 1937 and it was here that he acquired the management techniques that became characteristic of his leadership style. The concept of management based on the accumulation and analysis of quantitative data appealed to his disciplined mind and provided him with a tool for exercising control in uncertain conditions.
He applied this management style in the military during World War II and in private industry (Ford Motor Company) after the war. The aggressive new management techniques earned McNamara and his colleagues the nickname “Whiz Kids.” In November 1960 McNamara was named president of Ford Motor Company. But after only one month in this position, McNamara was called to the new Kennedy administration to serve as Secretary of Defense, with a mandate to bring the military under control through the application of efficient management.
McNamara quickly became involved in the substance and politics of government administration, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson sought his advice on defense, foreign policy, and international relations. The Vietnam War claimed much of McNamara’s time and energy at the Defense Department, and over the years he began to feel that victory in this war was impossible. His thinking on the war gradually diverged from that of President Johnson, and Johnson abruptly nominated McNamara as the next World Bank president.
ROLE:-
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

After just one month as Ford’s president, however, McNamara resigned to join the John F. Kennedy administration as secretary of defense. In his new post he successfully gained control of Pentagon operations and the military bureaucracy, encouraged the modernization of the armed forces, restructured budget procedures, and cut costs by refusing to spend money on what he believed were unnecessary or obsolete weapons systems. McNamara was also at the centre of a drive to alter U.S. military strategy from the “massive retaliation” of the Eisenhower years to a “flexible response,” emphasizing counterinsurgency techniques and second strike nuclear missile capability.

As early as 1965, however, McNamara had privately begun to question the wisdom of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and by 1967 he was openly seeking a way to launch peace negotiations. He initiated a top-secret full-scale investigation of the American commitment to Vietnam (later published as The Pentagon Papers), came out in opposition to continued bombing of North Vietnam (for which he lost influence in the Johnson administration), and in February 1968 left the Pentagon to become president of the World Bank
McNamara displayed what was generally regarded as great sensitivity to the needs of Third World nations. He retired from the World Bank in 1981 but remained active in many other organizations. He addressed issues such as world hunger, East-West relations, and other policy matters.

Considered to be one of the major strategists behind the war, McNamara was reviled by many in the peace movement. Some were also critical of the information he conveyed about the situation in Vietnam. McNamara visited Vietnam several times during his tenure as secretary of defense. During a later visit, he reportedly began to develop reservations as to whether the United States would be able to secure a victory over the communists.

The World Bank
The World Bank is an international organization dedicated to providing financing, advice, and research to developing nations to aid their economic advancement. The bank predominantly acts as an organization that attempts to fight poverty by offering developmental assistance to middle- and low-income countries.

Currently, the World Bank has two stated goals that it aims to achieve by 2030. The first is to end extreme poverty by decreasing the number of people living on less than $1.90 a day to below 3% of the world population. The second is to increase overall prosperity by increasing income growth in the bottom 40% of every country in the world.

Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.

Eradication of poverty
Friom the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.

One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress.
He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.

To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people,

McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

THE WORLD BANK:
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects.
With 189 member countries, staff from more than 170 countries, and offices in over 130 locations, the World Bank Group is a unique global partnership: five institutions working for sustainable solutions that reduce poverty and build shared prosperity in developing countries.
Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions. Originally, its loans helped rebuild countries devastated by World War II. In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads. With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal. The subsequent launch of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency further rounded out the Bank Group’s ability to connect global financial resources to the needs of developing countries.
Today the Bank Group’s work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of people’s lives in developing countries. While sound project selection and design remain paramount, the Bank Group recognizes a wide range of factors that are critical to success—effective institutions, sound policies, continuous learning through evaluation and knowledge-sharing, and partnership, including with the private sector. The Bank Group has long-standing relationships with more than 180 member countries, and it taps these to address development challenges that are increasingly global. On critical issues like climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, the Bank Group plays a leading role because it is able to convene discussion among its country members and a wide array of partners. It can help address crises while building the foundations for longer-term, sustainable development.
The evolution of the Bank Group has also been reflected in the diversity of its multidisciplinary staff, who include economists, public policy experts, sector experts, and social scientists, based at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in the field. Today, more than a third of staff are based in country offices.
As demand for its services has increased over time, the Bank Group has risen to meet them. For perspective, the World Bank made four loans totaling $497 million in 1947, as compared to 302 commitments totaling $60 billion in 2015.

World bank from ROBERT S. MCNAMARA (the 5th president of the world bank 1968 – 1981)
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
HISTORY:
Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics and excelling in his studies. His personal experiences during the Great Depression and the liberal outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. He enrolled in the Harvard Business School in 1937 and it was here that he acquired the management techniques that became characteristic of his leadership style. The concept of management based on the accumulation and analysis of quantitative data appealed to his disciplined mind and provided him with a tool for exercising control in uncertain conditions.
He applied this management style in the military during World War II and in private industry (Ford Motor Company) after the war. The aggressive new management techniques earned McNamara and his colleagues the nickname “Whiz Kids.” In November 1960 McNamara was named president of Ford Motor Company. But after only one month in this position, McNamara was called to the new Kennedy administration to serve as Secretary of Defense, with a mandate to bring the military under control through the application of efficient management.
McNamara quickly became involved in the substance and politics of government administration, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson sought his advice on defense, foreign policy, and international relations. The Vietnam War claimed much of McNamara’s time and energy at the Defense Department, and over the years he began to feel that victory in this war was impossible. His thinking on the war gradually diverged from that of President Johnson, and Johnson abruptly nominated McNamara as the next World Bank president.
Duty OF THE WORLD BANK:
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

Name-Eze Joy Ozioma
Reg No-2018/242430
Assignment on Eco 362
THE ROLE OF WORLD BANK
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.

ROLE OF WORLD BANK IN ERADICATION OF POVERTY
By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978). These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development that we know today.
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.
McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
Oil Crisis
The oil shocks of the 1970s proved to be the most serious threat to the fight against poverty. No longer was the burning question how to reduce the number of the poor, but rather how to prevent a massive increase in their number. McNamara responded in his proven method: asses the damage, express it in numerical terms; and then work on a solution. He estimated that the poor countries needed an additional three to four billion dollars in concessional assistance, and he urged the industrial countries and the oil producing states to provide this support. OPEC agreed to increase their commitments – $2 billion by 1974, and by 1975 OPEC members were contributing 3 per cent of their GNP.
Structural Adjustment
In response to the oil crises, McNamara urged developing countries to adjust their economic policies: change the pattern of use and production of energy, increase the production of food grains, and revise their policies of subsidized capital, overvalued exchange rates and excessive regulation. He also asked donor countries to actively support structural adjustment programs. He called for a fundamental reorientation of economic policies to accomplish higher savings and investment rates, greater efficiency in the domestic use of capital, and more emphasis on the private sector than he had previously advocated.
Some executive directors objected to these programs: some did not see this short-term response as appropriate for an institution meant to support long-term investment; some felt uneasy at what they felt was an unwarranted intrusion by the Bank into a country’s economic policies. Support for structural adjustment was obtained only when the Bank assured the directors that this was to be a short-lived program to meet immediate needs. Structural adjustment operations subsequently became a major aspect of the Bank Group’s lending throughout the next decade.
Rural Development
Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Urban Development
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

WORLD BANK LENDING THROUGH THE 1960s To 70s
In Quest to combat poverty from the developing nations, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal. The subsequent launch of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency further rounded out the Bank Group’s ability to connect global financial resources to the needs of developing countries. McNamara was never constrained by the Bank’s tradition of financial prudence. He felt that the daunting problems faced by the world required daring and risk-taking. Upon his arrival at the Bank, McNamara was surprised at what he considered the small volume of lending the Bank had made compared to the vastness of the needs. He developed an elaborate system of numerical reporting tables that provide complete and up-to-date pictures of the lending program and country needs: the Bank’s balance sheet, cash flow, lending program, and borrowing requirements. These reporting methods grew progressively more complex as McNamara insisted that more data be included in the reports.
Bank commitments increased from an annual level of about $1 billion in 1968 to over $13 billion in fiscal 1981. Governments were urged to speed up the preparation of appropriate projects to expedite the increased lending. McNamara quickly realized that a list of individual projects for a particular member country should conform to an overall development strategy, and in 1969 he instituted the practice of creating Country Program Papers.
The proposed increase in the Bank’s activities required a rapid expansion in the number of staff. Between 1968 and 1973 the professional staff increased in number by 125%. The staff as a whole grew from 1,600 at the time he took over to 5,700 when he left in 1981. In addition to the increase in numbers, the nationality diversification of staff was increased. The results of these simultaneous changes caused some degree of tension and strain among staff.
McNamara also decided that the Bank’s organizational structure required an overhaul. With an expanding volume of business the system of large centralized projects departments and geographical regional departments became unwieldy and bureaucratic. In 1972 he hired McKinsey & Co. to analyze the existing structure and business and to make recommendations for change. McNamara followed the process closely and in 1972 a major reorganizaiton of the Bank took place. Responsibility for lending was placed in the hands of regional vice presidents, who had control over resources required to meet agreed output targets.
McNamara expanded the geographical range of the Bank’s lending, and the Bank became actively engaged in all countries that needed help. He re-established lending relationships with Egypt and Indonesia, and the latter became one of the Bank’s most important country programs. McNamara took personal charge of the membership negotiations with the People’s Republic of China. The prospect of extending the Bank’s support to a country with a billion people was a fascinating challenge for McNamara, and he used his considerable political skills to expedite membership. In May 1980, the People’s Republic of China assumed its membership in the Bank.

The drastic increase in lending activities stimulated a debate over project quantity versus quality. McNamara denied that increased lending would sacrifice project quality, insisting that the same sound appraisal methods would be used. In fact, the appraisal process became more rigorous and sophisticated, the amount of staff time devoted to preparation and appraisal increased, and conditions designed to safeguard implementation and project supervision became more extensive. Nevertheless, there was a widespread perception among the staff that quality was being sacrificed for quantity. (The issue was never satisfactorily resolved during McNamara’s tenure, and this perception persisted until the 1992 Task Force on Portfolio Management pointed out the tension between new commitments and effective implementation.)
Funding the Blank
McNamara’s sharply increased level of lending necessitated a quantum leap in mobilizing both conventional and concessional resources. When McNamara arrived at the Bank, the climate for a massive increase of development aid was unfavorable. The UN Development Decade resulted in some donor fatigue as development problems persisted. Despite the adverse economic situation (the Bank’s liquidity was low, necessitating a temporary suspension of lending toward the end of George Woods’ tenure; IDA replenishment negotiations were stalled; and the US Treasury refused permission for the Bank to enter the capital market with any large issues), McNamara announced that in his first five years the Bank’s net borrowing would increase to three times the level of the previous five years.
To accomplish this he proposed to increase borrowings from central banks; break into the European pension trust market, and borrow more in Switzerland, Kuwait and Italy. He looked outside of Wall Street to Germany, Japan, and the oil-rich Middle East. He hired Eugene Rotberg to take command of his ambitious borrowing plans. McNamara’s plans were extraordinarily successful, and the Bank’s net borrowings averaged $780 million per year during the first five years of McNamara’s presidency.
The first oil shock presented a particular challenge to the Bank and its member countries. McNamara responded by increasing the lending level even more.

Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
Role of the World Bank
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.
Enlarging the Bank
McNamara was never constrained by the Bank’s tradition of financial prudence. He felt that the daunting problems faced by the world required daring and risk-taking. Upon his arrival at the Bank, McNamara was surprised at what he considered the small volume of lending the Bank had made compared to the vastness of the needs. He developed an elaborate system of numerical reporting tables that provide complete and up-to-date pictures of the lending program and country needs: the Bank’s balance sheet, cash flow, lending program, and borrowing requirements. These reporting methods grew progressively more complex as McNamara insisted that more data be included in the reports.
McNamara also decided that the Bank’s organizational structure required an overhaul. With an expanding volume of business the system of large centralized projects departments and geographical regional departments became unwieldy and bureaucratic. In 1972 he hired McKinsey & Co. to analyze the existing structure and business and to make recommendations for change. McNamara followed the process closely and in 1972 a major reorganizaiton of the Bank took place. Responsibility for lending was placed in the hands of regional vice presidents, who had control over resources required to meet agreed output targets.
McNamara expanded the geographical range of the Bank’s lending, and the Bank became actively engaged in all countries that needed help. He re-established lending relationships with Egypt and Indonesia, and the latter became one of the Bank’s most important country programs. McNamara took personal charge of the membership negotiations with the People’s Republic of China. The prospect of extending the Bank’s support to a country with a billion people was a fascinating challenge for McNamara, and he used his considerable political skills to expedite membership. In May 1980, the People’s Republic of China assumed its membership in the Bank.
The drastic increase in lending activities stimulated a debate over project quantity versus quality. McNamara denied that increased lending would sacrifice project quality, insisting that the same sound appraisal methods would be used. In fact, the appraisal process became more rigorous and sophisticated, the amount of staff time devoted to preparation and appraisal increased, and conditions designed to safeguard implementation and project supervision became more extensive. Nevertheless, there was a widespread perception among the staff that quality was being sacrificed for quantity. (The issue was never satisfactorily resolved during McNamara’s tenure, and this perception persisted until the 1992 Task Force on Portfolio Management pointed out the tension between new commitments and effective implementation.)
Funding the Bank
McNamara’s sharply increased level of lending necessitated a quantum leap in mobilizing both conventional and concessional resources. When McNamara arrived at the Bank, the climate for a massive increase of development aid was unfavorable. The UN Development Decade resulted in some donor fatigue as development problems persisted. Despite the adverse economic situation (the Bank’s liquidity was low, necessitating a temporary suspension of lending toward the end of George Woods’ tenure; IDA replenishment negotiations were stalled; and the US Treasury refused permission for the Bank to enter the capital market with any large issues), McNamara announced that in his first five years the Bank’s net borrowing would increase to three times the level of the previous five years.
To accomplish this he proposed to increase borrowings from central banks; break into the European pension trust market, and borrow more in Switzerland, Kuwait and Italy. He looked outside of Wall Street to Germany, Japan, and the oil-rich Middle East. He hired Eugene Rotberg to take command of his ambitious borrowing plans. McNamara’s plans were extraordinarily successful, and the Bank’s net borrowings averaged $780 million per year during the first five years of McNamara’s presidency.
The first oil shock presented a particular challenge to the Bank and its member countries. McNamara responded by increasing the lending level even more. McNamara turned to the members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to finance this increase. He negotiated with the Shah of Iran for a development fund supported and controlled by OPEC and administered by the Bank. This did not materialize due to opposition from the U.S. government, and McNamara’s support for the fund caused tensions with the U.S. Treasury.
Tensions with the U.S. arose again when the Bank sought a general capital increase in the 1970s. After two years of negotiations, a selective capital increase of $8.5 billion was approved in 1976. While this provided some relief, it did not satisfy McNamara’s demands. He created a task force to consider “the future role of the Bank”, which concluded that an increase of $45 billion was needed to support the needs of the borrowers. The executive directors ultimately approved a capital increase of $40 billion in 1979, following the second oil shock.
McNamara was willing to examine new approaches to mobilize resources for development. In 1975 he introduced the “third window” lending, an attempt to leverage limited concessional funds. And he attempted to create a separate energy affiliate to assist developing countries in the improvement of their energy position. He was also ready to consider a recommendation of the Brandt Commission that the statutory ratio between the Bank’s lending and its equity be relaxed. Only the “third window” proposal came into being, but these efforts illustrate McNamara’s untiring search for new ways to mobilize resources.
IDA Replenishment
The task of raising the necessary IDA funding – concessional funds for the Bank Group’s poorest members – became a personal challenge for McNamara. He used his extensive political contacts to bolster Congressional support in the U.S. He contacted prominent and persuasive people in the U.K., the Netherlands and Kuwait to urge positive action for IDA.
War on Poverty
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.
From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.
McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold. Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.
McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.
McNamara did not see private capital as a realistic option in addressing critical development needs. But his reliance upon government intervention sometimes meant turning a blind eye to coercive practices – the involuntary collectivization of farmers in Tanzania, for example – and could lead the Bank to ignore the inefficiency and economic cost of government policies.
Oil Crisis
The oil shocks of the 1970s proved to be the most serious threat to the fight against poverty. No longer was the burning question how to reduce the number of the poor, but rather how to prevent a massive increase in their number. McNamara responded in his proven method: asses the damage, express it in numerical terms; and then work on a solution. He estimated that the poor countries needed an additional three to four billion dollars in concessional assistance, and he urged the industrial countries and the oil producing states to provide this support. OPEC agreed to increase their commitments – $2 billion by 1974, and by 1975 OPEC members were contributing 3 per cent of their GNP.
Structural Adjustment
In response to the oil crises, McNamara urged developing countries to adjust their economic policies: change the pattern of use and production of energy, increase the production of food grains, and revise their policies of subsidized capital, overvalued exchange rates and excessive regulation. He also asked donor countries to actively support structural adjustment programs. He called for a fundamental reorientation of economic policies to accomplish higher savings and investment rates, greater efficiency in the domestic use of capital, and more emphasis on the private sector than he had previously advocated.
Some executive directors objected to these programs: some did not see this short-term response as appropriate for an institution meant to support long-term investment; some felt uneasy at what they felt was an unwarranted intrusion by the Bank into a country’s economic policies. Support for structural adjustment was obtained only when the Bank assured the directors that this was to be a short-lived program to meet immediate needs. Structural adjustment operations subsequently became a major aspect of the Bank Group’s lending throughout the next decade.

Name: Kalu Melody Chinaza
Department: Economics
Registration number:2018/245127
An assignment on Eco 362(Development Economics)

Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions. Originally, its loans helped rebuild countries devastated by World War II. In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads. With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal.

Currently, the Bank Group’s work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of people’s lives in developing countries. While sound project selection and design remain paramount, the Bank Group recognizes a wide range of factors that are critical to success—effective institutions, sound policies, continuous learning through evaluation and knowledge-sharing, and partnership, including with the private sector. The Bank Group has long-standing relationships with more than 180 member countries, and it taps these to address development challenges that are increasingly global. On critical issues like climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, the Bank Group plays a leading role because it is able to convene discussion among its country members and a wide array of partners. It can help address crises while building the foundations for longer-term, sustainable development.

Hence, theWorld Bank has lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace.

REG NO: 2018/242297
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS II (ECO 362)

Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

McNamara’s most important legacy remains the focus on poverty reduction. The belief
that there would be no prospect for lasting, stable, and sustainable development without
the eradication of poverty took hold during his tenure at the Bank. Poverty came to be
seen as the major obstacle to achieving the balanced and sustainable development that
all were struggling for.
The poverty focus began to be shared widely by bilateral agencies (especially the US
Agency for International Development, USAID), several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and several academic centers in the 1950s and the 1960s, especially in Europe
(for example, at the Institute for Development Studies at Sussex University in the
United Kingdom and various research centers in France). The World Bank began
to direct its attention to poverty reduction and so to put a priority on rural development. One focus was on improved access to development resources for small farmers who had been bypassed by previous development projects. In practice, their activities and achievements remained somewhat diffused and uncoordinated. The advantage of World Bank research and policy work was its learning from innovations and research of others, assessing and adapting them, helping countries implement them at scale, and learning again from experience and, importantly, ongoing evaluation. It was in this process that McNamara and his team, through his speeches and policies and
through the World Bank’s lending program, had a powerful impact on policies and programs of developing countries in all regions of the world and among the donor community. But in some respects, work on poverty grew through the 1970s, and the Bank has called this its human focus period, emphasizing access of the poor to education and health services. It took McNamara’s initiative to promote a general understanding and recognition that, not only could the poor contribute effectively to the growth process, but a lasting, balanced development process could not take place without the full participation and contribution of the poor.
This emphasis on development for people became central. McNamara’s personal
commitment to reaching people is reflected in the ample time he devoted to field
visits. Some of the World Bank’s publications following the McNamara era further
solidified the focus on the social dimensions of development.
As mentioned, this focus on the poor came with a further distinction between the
“absolute poor” and those who were defined as “relatively poor.” By and large, the
poor were classified as the bottom 40 percent of a population in any given country.
This emphasis, especially on the “absolute poor,” was upheld long after McNamara
left the World Bank, and it is still widely recognized as the universal goal for all
development institutions.

Name: Ogbuewu Cosmos Nnachetam
Reg No: 2018/243754
Department: Economics

The then World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals which was to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty. These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused primarily on development because during the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty so, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly.
The Worlds bank then made provisions to lend to member states. between 1968 and 1981, Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold and expanded into several new sectors such as: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, etc.
Also, During the 1970s economists were the primary advisers in the Bank, but staff with different skills in anthropology, sociology, environmental science and other sectors were hired to provide even more expertise to clients.

Name: Chris-Nwaije Ihuoma Nancy
Reg No: 2018/241847
Economics Department

Robert Mcnamara was the first world bank president to set poverty reduction (real improvements in the lives of poor people) as the bank’s objective in the context of the Cold War and the directions of US foreign aid policy.

In 1973, Robert McNamara, then President of the World Bank, was one of the earliest pioneers to boldly describe the alarming facts of absolute poverty in the developing world and to call for a rigorous response based on a moral imperative. In his 1973 Nairobi speech to the Board of Governors, McNamara outlined a strategy toward its reduction or elimination. While recognizing the hurdle that citizens in the developed world would have to overcome to allow increasing sums of money to be used to assist the poorest of the poor, he emphasized that rural development was to be the centerpiece of his plan to raise the productivity of the poor.

Governments of the developing world were called to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. As time went on, despite countries’ positive annual growth, malnutrition persisted, infant mortality remained high, life expectancy was low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment soared, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.

The Integrated rural development (IRD) approach thus became the prototype for this assistance. These programs grew out of this original excitement of development practitioners, which hoped to transform undeveloped rural settings into cohesive communities, with profitable productive opportunities, and where members could enjoy basic public and social services. While rural development programs went on to benefit millions, rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best, indirectly. As many studies have attested, IRD projects achieved disappointing results. Some projects failed due to serious Institutional weaknesses, and progress was slowest where most needed—in Sub-Saharan Africa. What happened to the approach launched with such confidence and optimism?

In the 1970s, the World Bank and other donor agencies entered poverty reduction and rural development in a major way with IRD programs. These programs focused on participation, community empowerment, and the decentralization of local institutions, arguing that this approach is able to achieve results by aligning development priorities with community goals. In practice, however, the programs suffered the same fate as earlier community development programs, becoming centralized, bureaucratic, and unable to coordinate actors on the ground. Some countries saw decentralization as a means of dismantling command economies, others a tool for poverty reduction, and still others as a path to grassroots empowerment. Regardless of the hope the approach held out at the outset, realities in the world economy sidetracked development practitioners to more pressing challenges.

The world debt crisis of 1982 lasted well into the end of the 1980s, during which time the Bank’s main focus was stabilization and structural adjustment programs (SAP) via macroeconomic and sector policy reforms. At this time, the Bank was forced to face a renewed emphasis on poverty reduction in the midst of needing to mitigate the negative impacts and unintended consequences of SAPs, which had a draconian effect on the poor.

By the early 1990s, the formal IRD approach was discredited and abandoned by the World Bank and most donors. Large-scale irrigation and rural development project lending was replaced by support for human development sector. Tough lessons had been learned. To improve a community’s “well-being” in social, economic, and environmental terms, outside-initiated transformation does not come easily. Practitioners had learned that target communities—not their national, nor regional governments, nor even their village headmen—must have true ownership over this process or it does not work. Necessary community mobilization requires extensive work for which the international donor community does not have the appetite, expertise, nor patience in pursuing given their institutional priorities, and legal and financial frameworks. Policy makers must keep these considerations in mind as they consider how best to harness the power of communities.

Some reasons IRDs fell short of expectations:

• Communities were not adequately consulted or involved in project design, implementation, and monitoring. Even in projects with the objective of high levels of participation, local knowledge was often a construct of the planning context.

• IRD projects exhibited the usual top-down approach. Central government officials continued to make decisions on project design and implementation.

• IRD projects were often too complex, with numerous components and executing agencies, entering into many sectors simultaneously, demanding too much from weak institutions and leaving little to no capacity building.

• Countries began to view agriculture as a declining sector and thus unimportant for development. As a sector, agriculture growth depends on the successful, simultaneous development of other parts of the rural sector.

• Political power of the urban elites explains the urban bias so characteristic of policies, institutions, and expenditure patterns in developing countries.

• Rural communities tend to be more dispersed, poor, inarticulate and disorganized and rural areas suffer from their own inequality: the rural elite.

• Rural poor have little political voice. Communities with greater capacity, political networks, or wealth are more likely to propose and win subprojects.

• The rural sector has been discriminated against; the urban bias means that the rural communities suffer from non-existent social services.

The IRD approach was well-intended in the face of McNamara’s daunting cry for help. His gamble to empower communities to achieve better results was a good one. Now in hindsight, we can say that decades of its use has afforded many lessons learned, offering policy makers and government officials better tools and methods to design projects with a more realistic, seasoned approach to reach the poorest of the poor. National governments have gained understanding of what it means to listen to their local communities in order to help them. While ownership was never fully achieved with IRD programs, IRDs as a tool in the World Bank’s arsenal have not disappeared from the World Bank portfolio.

In 1973 Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank, speaking to his board of directors in Nairobi, proposed a concrete target:

“We should strive to eradicate absolute poverty by the end of this century. That means in practice the elimination of malnutrition and illiteracy, the reduction of infant mortality, and the raising of life-expectancy standards to those of the developed nations.”1

McNamara had a clear notion of the relation between poverty and inequalities:

“The basic problem of poverty and growth in the developing world can be stated very simply. The growth is not equitably reaching the poor. And the poor are not significantly contributing to growth (…)”

“Despite a decade of unprecedented increase in the gross national product (GDP)of the developing countries, the poorest segments of their population have received relatively little benefit. Nearly 800 million individuals – 40 percent out of a total of 2 billion – survive on incomes estimated (in U.S. purchasing power) at 30 cents per day in conditions of malnutrition, illiteracy, and squalor. They are suffering poverty in the absolute sense.”

To confront this problem, he said, developed countries should commit to increasing ODA up to 0.7 percent of their GDP by 1975, as pledged in a 1970 General Assembly resolution and improve the terms of trade of developing countries. The latter should, in turn, tackle internal inequalities, particularly through land reform, since absolute poverty was then mainly a rural problem.

References:
https://www.socialwatch.org/node/17284
https://advocacy.thp.org/2015/08/what-happened-to-integrated-rural-development/

   My thoughts:
The project and program lending policies of the World Bank under the leadership of Robert McNamara was not as successful as it should have been, due in large part, to the reasons listed above some of which include not quite understanding the intrinsic differences in the economic, political and cultural structure of these developing countries in which most of the World’s poor reside. Till date, poverty eradication seems to have remained an illustrious goal the world keeps trying to attain. It seems a lesson in futility especially in light if the pandemic, which put even more people in extreme poverty, and the ever expanding population of these developing countries. Poverty eradication is still a target of the world bank, sdgs, mdgs, indeed most global institutions and programs are targeting the reduction of persons living in absolute poverty in the world. The United Nations declared “freedom from fear of want” as one of the human rights in its Universal declaration of 1948

Robert Mcnamara succeeded in the sense that he was the first president to redirect the objectives of the World Bank from being primarily concerned with making “desirable investments” for the developed countries (that fund its programs) to an intensive, intentional and almost aggressive lending to the poorer countries to lift their masses out of poverty. He expanded the portfolio of the world bank and has set a legacy and a target the bank seems determined to attain. The World Bank has continued to support developing countries I order to attain this goal.

NAME: OWOH ANAYO JONATHAN
DEPT: ECONOMICS
REG NO: 2018/250325
COURSE TITLE: DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS 2
COURSE CODE: ECO 362
ANSWERS:
THE WORLD BANK:
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects.
With 189 member countries, staff from more than 170 countries, and offices in over 130 locations, the World Bank Group is a unique global partnership: five institutions working for sustainable solutions that reduce poverty and build shared prosperity in developing countries.
Founded in 1944, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—soon called the World Bank—has expanded to a closely associated group of five development institutions. Originally, its loans helped rebuild countries devastated by World War II. In time, the focus shifted from reconstruction to development, with a heavy emphasis on infrastructure such as dams, electrical grids, irrigation systems, and roads. With the founding of the International Finance Corporation in 1956, the institution became able to lend to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries. And the founding of the International Development Association in 1960 put greater emphasis on the poorest countries, part of a steady shift toward the eradication of poverty becoming the Bank Group’s primary goal. The subsequent launch of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency further rounded out the Bank Group’s ability to connect global financial resources to the needs of developing countries.
Today the Bank Group’s work touches nearly every sector that is important to fighting poverty, supporting economic growth, and ensuring sustainable gains in the quality of people’s lives in developing countries. While sound project selection and design remain paramount, the Bank Group recognizes a wide range of factors that are critical to success—effective institutions, sound policies, continuous learning through evaluation and knowledge-sharing, and partnership, including with the private sector. The Bank Group has long-standing relationships with more than 180 member countries, and it taps these to address development challenges that are increasingly global. On critical issues like climate change, pandemics, and forced migration, the Bank Group plays a leading role because it is able to convene discussion among its country members and a wide array of partners. It can help address crises while building the foundations for longer-term, sustainable development.
The evolution of the Bank Group has also been reflected in the diversity of its multidisciplinary staff, who include economists, public policy experts, sector experts, and social scientists, based at headquarters in Washington, D.C., and in the field. Today, more than a third of staff are based in country offices.
As demand for its services has increased over time, the Bank Group has risen to meet them. For perspective, the World Bank made four loans totaling $497 million in 1947, as compared to 302 commitments totaling $60 billion in 2015.

World bank from ROBERT S. MCNAMARA (the 5th president of the world bank 1968 – 1981)
Robert McNamara shaped the Bank as no one before him. He came to the Bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved. What was needed was clear analysis of the problems and determination in the application of appropriate remedies. If this happened, success could not fail to materialize.
McNamara eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.
The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.
McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.
PERSONAL HISTORY:
Robert Strange McNamara was born in Oakland, California in 1916. He attended University of California at Berkeley, majoring in economics and excelling in his studies. His personal experiences during the Great Depression and the liberal outlook at Berkeley combined to shape his liberal social outlook. He enrolled in the Harvard Business School in 1937 and it was here that he acquired the management techniques that became characteristic of his leadership style. The concept of management based on the accumulation and analysis of quantitative data appealed to his disciplined mind and provided him with a tool for exercising control in uncertain conditions.
He applied this management style in the military during World War II and in private industry (Ford Motor Company) after the war. The aggressive new management techniques earned McNamara and his colleagues the nickname “Whiz Kids.” In November 1960 McNamara was named president of Ford Motor Company. But after only one month in this position, McNamara was called to the new Kennedy administration to serve as Secretary of Defense, with a mandate to bring the military under control through the application of efficient management.
McNamara quickly became involved in the substance and politics of government administration, and Presidents Kennedy and Johnson sought his advice on defense, foreign policy, and international relations. The Vietnam War claimed much of McNamara’s time and energy at the Defense Department, and over the years he began to feel that victory in this war was impossible. His thinking on the war gradually diverged from that of President Johnson, and Johnson abruptly nominated McNamara as the next World Bank president.
ROLE OF THE WORLD BANK:
The World Bank was, to McNamara, “an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead.” The primary consideration driving the Bank was the needs of the developing countries. It was obvious that these countries required more assistance than they had been receiving, and he set out to make the Bank a “critical mass” of financial and technical power. McNamara realized that the Bank could not solve by itself the world’s problems; but it could provide leadership and the will to leverage the world’s resources for development.
McNamara believed that there was a direct link between concerns about military security and economic development. For McNamara the threat of warfare was a consequence of the widening income gap between the industrial and developing countries.

QUESTION.

Between 1973 and 1980, the World Bank, led by Robert McNamara, became a significant actor in the push to address social welfare in developing countries. In his view, it was imperative (in light of the Cold War) for the World Bank to work with governments to eradicate absolute poverty in developing nations. Although project lending aimed at the development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture still continued, the programs initiated during the McNamara era were directly aimed at the eradication of absolute poverty. The World Bank lent large sums to facilitate rural development, urban development, and development of small-scale industry and other critical programmes that had direct impact on the populace. Discuss

ANSWER

By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978). These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development that we know today.
Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold between 1968 and 1981, and expanded into new sectors: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, and others. The global effort to eradicate river blindness is one example of how the Bank worked to improve the lives of the poor, which was different from the large infrastructure projects that were done in the Bank’s first 20 y ears. The first loan for the environment was in 1971 for pollution control in Brazil, and the Bank subsequently built environmental safeguards into its process. During the 1970s economists were the primary advisers in the Bank, but staff with different skills in anthropology, sociology, environmental science and other sectors were hired to provide even more expertise to clients.
By the late 1960s, when Robert McNamara Became its president, for the first time the Bank began To direct its attention to poverty reduction and so to Put a priority on rural development. One focus was on Improved access to development resources for small Farmers who had been bypassed by previous development projects; success was mixed at best, however, and agricultural lending fell drastically in subsequent years. But in some respects work on poverty grew Through the 1970s, and the Bank has called this its human focus period emphasizing access of the poor to education and health services. But critics argued these Efforts were ineffective due to failure to work directly with people living in poverty and comprehend their constraints, or to deal with elites who undermined or siphoned resources from projects. In the 1980s, debt and finance became the focus. In the 1970s, and early 1980s developing countries took on a lot of debt. The Bank started concentrating structural adjustment loans—large loans that come with certain conditions on what the country can do with the Money, and What kinds of policies they need to implement, primarily focused on liberalization, marketization, and privatization. The activities of the Bank to a large extent merged with the Fund in this period and were heavily criticized by many economic development specialists and by developing countries. For example, the poor Were harmed by the emphasis on policies such as“cost recovery” for services that in many cases in Africa and elsewhere was expected to extend to school and health care fees. The goal of debt reduction was often explicit; Primary beneficiaries would include Foreign banks. “Structural adjustment” loans were designed to promote a fundamental restructuring of the economies of countries plagued by chronic trade and budget deficits by improving the macroeconomic policy environment with an emphasis on (a) mobilizing
(b) improving public-sector efficiency by stressing price-determined allocation of public investments and improving the efficiency of public Enterprise,
c) improving the productivity of public-sector investments by liberalizing trade and domestic economic policies, and (d) reforming institutional arrangements to sup port the adjustment process Critics of structural adjustment programs point to the fact that they frequently lead to increased hardships for the very poor and on occasion have substantially reversed the benefits of earlier economic progress. By the mid-1990s, the Bank resumed a greater focus on poverty.
McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica. McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers.
He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.
Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.
McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.
McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.
McNamara urged developing countries to adjust their economic policies: change the pattern of use and production of energy, increase the production of food grains, and revise their policies of subsidized capital, overvalued exchange rates and excessive regulation. He also asked donor countries to actively support structural adjustment programs. He called for a fundamental reorientation of economic policies to accomplish higher savings and investment rates, greater efficiency in the domestic use of capital, and more emphasis on the private sector than he had previously advocated.
Some executive directors objected to these programs: some did not see this short-term response as appropriate for an institution meant to support long-term investment; some felt uneasy at what they felt was an unwarranted intrusion by the Bank into a country’s economic policies. Support for structural adjustment was obtained only when the Bank assured the directors that this was to be a short-lived program to meet immediate needs. Structural adjustment operations subsequently became a major aspect of the Bank Group’s lending throughout the next decade

Name: Onyekwelu Collins Obinna
Reg No: 2018/251026
Dept: Economics

Robert McNamara, 5th President of the World Bank Group(1968 – 1981) eschewed the cautious, Wall Street-oriented approach of his predecessors. He adopted an aggressive mission that emphasized the claims and expectations of the Bank’s developing member countries. The needs of the developing world – not the need to satisfy the investment community – became paramount in determining the type and quantity of the Bank’s activities.

By the 1970s, over 40% of people in developing countries lived in absolute poverty and, in response, the World Bank’s projects aimed to help the poor directly. World Bank President Robert McNamara coined the term “absolute poverty” in his 1973 Annual Meeting speech, and was the first to communicate the World Bank’s twin goals: “…to accelerate economic growth and to reduce poverty.” (World Development Report, 1978). These concepts transformed the Bank into the institution focused on development that we know today.

Lending to member countries increased twelve-fold between 1968 and 1981, and expanded into new sectors: environment, rural development, water, sanitation, education, and others. The global effort to eradicate river blindness is one example of how the Bank worked to improve the lives of the poor, which was different from the large infrastructure projects that were done in the Bank’s first 20 years. The first loan for the environment was in 1971 for pollution control in Brazil, and the Bank subsequently built environmental safeguards into its process. During the 1970s economists were the primary advisers in the Bank, but staff with different skills in anthropology, sociology, environmental science and other sectors were hired to provide even more expertise to clients.

The Bank that McNamara left in 1981 was completely transformed from the institution he had entered thirteen years earlier. It was a much larger organization, and much more complex. Its membership had continued to expand, and with the People’s Republic of China assuming full participation, it was well on its way to becoming a universal organization. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. The Bank diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. And the Bank became more deeply involved in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. It diversified its sources of funding, drawing from a growing number of international sources.

McNamara’s role as a spokesman for the developing countries and the size and financial weight of the organization that he led assured the Bank a position of authority as intermediary between the rich and poor countries. The Bank played a critical role in many developing economies, and its coordination of aid with other donors greater increased the leverage it wielded. The strengthening of the research staff stimulated interaction with the academic community and allowed the Bank to claim a role as an intellectual leader in development matters.

Michael-Atu Ifunanya
2018/243767
Economics Education

WAR ON POVERTY
Throughout his tenure at the Bank, McNamara struggled to gain a clear understanding of the problems the developing countries were facing. He traveled extensively, and consulted with a wide group of development thinkers. He insisted on spending time in the field, visiting schools and population clinics, talking to farmers and extension workers. And he pushed the Bank to be more inquisitive about development issues. The Bank’s economic research capacity expanded under the leadership of Hollis Chenery. The collection and processing of data became an important institutional response to the quest for better understanding and more effective solutions.
From the beginning, McNamara tried to grasp the causes of economic underdevelopment. He knew that economic development was a multifaceted, multidimensional process, yet was always looking for some single key to the problem. This constant search for answers was reflected in the sequence of dominant themes in the work of the Bank during the McNamara period.
One issue that came to characterize the McNamara presidency was the problem of population growth. McNamara believed that rapid population growth was the greatest barrier to economic progress. The Bank’s first financing for family planning was in 1970 in Jamaica.

McNamara realized that economic growth without equitable distribution did little to change the worst economic problems. He turned to Hollis Chenery, head of the Bank’s economic research department, who focused on the problems related to the uneven income distribution in developing countries. Chenery’s Redistribution with Growth was published in 1974. McNamara presented the results of Chenery’s research at the 1972 UNCTAD Conference in Santiago, Chile. He stated that in the early stages of a country’s economic growth the poorest segment of society was liable to suffer the most. This was most evident in subsistence agrarian economies, and McNamara recommended measures such as land and tenancy reform and programs to increase the productivity of small farmers. He also emphasized the need for projects supporting education. During his tenure lending for education increased threefold.

Rural development was the centerpiece of the second five-year plan, introduced in Nairobi in 1973. To raise the productivity of the rural poor, the Bank increased lending to agriculture by over 40 percent, and three out of every four projects included components to help smallholder farmers. The integrated rural development project became the prototype for this assistance. Rural development programs benefited millions of people, but still rural laborers and the landless benefited, at best indirectly. Institutional weaknesses, such as tenant and land reform, hindered progress, and progress was slowest where it was most needed – in Sub-Saharan Africa.

McNamara also launched an attack on urban poverty, where he again attempted to raise the productivity of the poor. Urban assistance programs aimed at increasing employment opportunities, improving services, sites-and-service projects, squatter settlement programs, small-scale enterprise financing, and plans for basic services in transport, electricity, water supply, and education.

McNamara also urged governments to meet the “basic human needs” of their populations. Despite annual growth, malnutrition was common, infant mortality high, life expectancy low, illiteracy widespread, unemployment growing, income distribution skewed, and the gap between the rich and poor countries was growing. He devised strategies to address specific needs: literacy, nutrition, reduction in infant mortality, and health. McNamara’s obsession to assist those in “absolute poverty” remained the backbone of his presidential tenure.