World Bank history

The United States government picked Eugene Meyer, a 70-year-old retired investment banker, to lead the new institution, which officially opened on June 25, 1946.

As the United States government shouldered more of the burden for reconstruction under the Marshall Plan, launched in June 1947, the IBRD looked towards lending development funds to Third World countries.

The IRBD’s bond issues began showing consistent profits in 1948, earning the bank an outstanding credit rating.

The bank was reorganized on geographical lines in 1952.

In 1961, as President John F. Kennedy’s principal arms adviser, he negotiated terms for the resumption of East-West disarmament talks and drafted the bill that led to the establishment of the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

He was a member of the Warren Commission appointed in 1963 to investigate Kennedy’s assassination.

The ICSID set up in 1966 provides facilities to help countries arbitrate investment disputes and has solved 283 cases so far.

Robert McNamara—the former auto executive who had helped shaped United States policy during the Vietnam War—took over the IBRD presidency on April 1, 1968.

The bank moved to issue loans with floating interest rates in 1982.

In spite of the uncertainty these measures produced, Conable won the support of both employees and shareholders: in 1988, the IBRD landed its largest ever general capital increase (GCI) from the United States government.

In Hungary, for example, some 17,000 businesses were liquidated and 5,000 reorganized in 1992–93, leading to a substantial increase in unemployment.

Bank management continued to finance the dam until early 1993, when criticism of the project became so intense that India decided to finance the project itself.

Among the factors cited by the Bank for project failure in poor countries are ineffective government, corruption, and lack of transparency (World Bank 1994).

Savvy Australian-born investment banker James D. Wolfensohn became the bank’s president in June 1995.

The bank's Heavily-Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, first launched in 1996, has granted debt relief to some of the region's poorest countries, including Bolivia, Guyana, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Kapur, Devesh, John P. Lewis, and Richard Webb, eds., The World Bank: Its First Half Century, 2 vols., Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1997.

Skogly, Sigrun. (2001). Human Rights Obligations of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

In 2002 the Bank made $11.5 billion in loans in support of ninety-eight projects in forty countries. It currently has a total of about 1,800 projects in almost every developing country (McLellan 2003).