The World Bank has recently redirected its urban policies, moving from a focus raising productivity of the housing sector, to one that encourages ‘sustainable cities’. The expansion of the urban agenda hopes to improve urban governance while also building human capital through poverty alleviation programmes such as squatter upgrading. By promoting the discourse of ‘sustainable city’, the World ...

The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this report are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed in any manner to the World Bank, or its affiliated organizations, or to members of its board of executive directors or the countries they represent. The World Bank does not guarantee the accuracy of the data included in this publication and accepts no responsibi...

Using panel data for 188 countries over the period 1970-2002 this paper empirically analyzes the influence of the IMF and the World Bank on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. Countries receiving adjustment programs and larger non-concessional loans from the World Bank vote more frequently in line with the average G7 country. The same is true for countries obtaining non-concessional IMF...

Written contracts between governments and state enterprises have been widely used in World Bank projects since the first Bank operation supporting performance contracts, a 1975 operation in Senegal. A Bank survey of developing countries found 565 such contracts in thirty-two countries, and another 103,000 in China as of June 1994 (World Bank 1995). Although these performance contracts go by dif...