The Bank’s dominance

“The Bank’s dominance, moreover, was not just about money. Whatever the institution’s shortcomings—its weak communication skills under Preston, its sluggish response to the environmental movement—there was no question about its intellectual caliber. The environmental issue was a case in point. After a slow start, the Bank had by the mid-1990s assembled a strong environmental staff; it had helped virtually all its borrowers to prepare National Environmental Action Plans; it was producing, in the view of one frequently hostile observer, “an outpouring of high-quality research reports on environment-development interactions, making the Bank arguably the largest center for such research in the world.”

Excerpt From: Sebastian Mallaby. “The World’s Banker.”