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On concealed dimensions of Third World involvement in international economic organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Anthony D. Moulton
Anthony D. Moulton
Affiliation:
A manager in the Missouri State Division of Budget and Planning.
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Abstract

International economic organizations once identified as Western have evolved in some cases to the extent that their survival depends importantly on forging symbiotic links with Third and Fourth World clients. Such national governments often derive net gains from membership in those organizations, for example, the World Bank. These gains may be as much political as economic. Thus the Government of India, influential in World Bank policy generally, has used Bank agricultural projects to overcome states' resistance to central priorities. Mobilizing domestic political resources is an important dimension of membership in the international economy. Where this occurs, it argues for a view of the governments of poor countries as active, rather than passive, and as agents of domestic social transformation.

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Articles
Information
International Organization , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , Autumn 1978 , pp. 1019 - 1035
Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1978

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References

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16 See the Wall Street Journal, 26 December 1975, p. 2, for a brief review of GOI tactics and pressures in the petroleum takeover.

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20 U.S. oversight of the World Bank's operations is conducted through the National Advisory Council on International Monetary and Financial Policies, chaired by the Treasury and with State, Commerce, the Federal Reserve System and Export-Import Bank as its other members. AID attends Council meetings, functioning, in effect, as State's technical wing. Its evaluations frequently are decisive for State's position.

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29 See the editorial in the Quarterly Journal of the All-India Land Development Banks Co-operative Union Ltd. (Bombay), 06 1972Google Scholar: i–iv, and The Hindu (Madras), 31 July 1972.

30 For the Bank's rationale for market-determined input prices, see the sector paper referred to in note 26 above: 2–25.

31 See the sub-committee's Report (Bombay: Reserve Bank of India, 1945, reprinted in 1965), pp. 64, 111.

32 Since Independence, the Reserve Bank's set bank rate has changed as follows: raised from 3 percent to 3.5 percent in November 1951; raised to 4 percent in May 1957; raised to 4.5 percent in January 1963; raised to 5 percent in September 1964; raised to 6 percent in January 1965; lowered to 5 percent in March 1968; raised to 6 percent in January 1971; raised to 7 percent in May 1973; raised to 9 percent in July 1974. Source: Indian Institute of Public Opinion, Monthly Commentary 18 (08 1976): VIIIGoogle Scholar.

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37 IDA lending has a “grant equivalent” of 86.4 percent. Mason, and Asher, , The World Bank Since Bretton Woods, p. 399Google Scholar.

38 Computed from the World Bank's 1975 Review of the Indian Economy (Washington, D.C., 1975)Google Scholar, tables 3.9, 4.1,4.2, and 5.8.

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46 The general political, and more narrowly economic, orientations of “the West” in this arena are anything but uniform. Sweden, Great Britain, Canada, and other Western donors take a much less interventionist stance toward the Bank than do the United States, West Germany, and Japan.

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49 Ibid., p. 438.