Logo

Synopsis The greatest success of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank has been as globalizes.  But at whose cost? Would borrowing countries be better off without the IMF and World Bank? This book takes readers inside these institutions and the governments they work with.  Ngaire Woods brilliantly decodes what they do and why they do it, using original research, extensive interviews carried out across many countries and institutions, and scholarship from the fields of economic, law, and politics.  The Globalizes focuses on both the political context of IMF and World Bank actions and their impact on the countries in which they intervene.  After describing the important debates between U.S. planners and the Allies in the 1944 foundations at Bretton Woods, she analyzes understandings of their missions over the last quarter century.  She traces the impacttbe Bank and the Fund in the recent economic history of Mexico, of post-Soviet Russia, and in the independent states of Africa.  Woods concludes by proposing a range of reforms that would make the World Bank and the IMF more effective, equitable, and just.