World Bank (est. 1944).At the July 1944 Bretton Woods Conference in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, forty‐four nations, including the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, agreed to establish the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, but called the World Bank) to provide loans to governments for postwar economic reconstruction. The IBRD officially came into existence on 27 December 1945, when states holding 65 percent of the bank's shares approved the agreement. The bank's headquarters are in Washington, D.C. Each of the 179 member states has one representative on the board of governors. Each state's voting power, however, depends on the number of bank shares held by the state. The United States as the single largest investor currently holds 16.53 percent of the shares.
The World Bank's membership and objectives were affected by the
Cold War. The Soviet Union never joined the bank; post–Soviet Russia, however, became a member on 1 June 1992. In 1948–52, the European Recovery Program—the
Marshall Plan—superseded the IBRD as the primary reconstruction aid provider for Western Europe. The bank's main objective became making or guaranteeing loans to developing states. Since the early 1990s, aid to Eastern European countries, including member states of the former Soviet Union, has become an increasingly important aspect of the bank's work. In January 1996, the IBRD granted Bosnia a $150 million loan to aid rebuilding after the end of its civil war.
From its inception to 30 June 1998, the World Bank has granted 7,112 loans to 168 recipients, totaling $425 billion. African states received 18 percent of that amount, Asian and Pacific countries 42 percent, Near Eastern states 3 percent, European countries (including Russia) 12 percent, and Latin American and Caribbean states 25 percent.
[See also
Bosnian Crisis.]
Bibliography
Robert W. Oliver , International Economic Cooperation and the World Bank, 1975.
Michael D. Bordon and Barry Eichengreen, eds., A Retrospective on the Bretton Woods System, 1993.
Georg Schild