The Multilateral Development Banks: Volume 5, Titans or Behemoths?

The multilateral banks are powerful forces in the international community, providing loans of more than $250 billion to developing countries over the last half-century. The best-known of these, the World Bank, has been studied extensively, but the "regional development banks" are little understood, even within their own geographic regions. This book synthesizes the insights of four "regional" books, summarizing key points and also examining the multilateral banks (including the World Bank and the recently created European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) as a genre of development agencies. Among the difficult questions Culpeper addresses are: How effectively do the multilateral banks assist the world's one billion desperately poor? What has been their role in the evolving debt crisis? In an era of diminishing aid budgets and rising private-sector flows to developing countries, do these institutions even have a future?