Back in late January I wrote here about a book by David A. Phillips that examined efforts at re-organizing the World Bank. Phillips, who worked at the Bank for 14 years himself, looks with especial care at a 20 year period, 1988 - 2008. He ends up quite disenchanted.
I continue to read the book in small pieces. In chapter 8, Phillips quotes Gavin and Rodrik thus: "There is something more than a little schizophrenic about an agency that preempts potential private lenders because they are allegedly too risk averse (a main rationale for Bank lending), then demands that its loans should be senior to any other, thereby shifting most of the risk onto private lenders."
Yes, you might say, "rings true, but who are Gavin and Rodrik?" The answer, M. Gavin and D. Rodrik are the co-authors of an article in the American Economic Review in 1995, "The World Bank in Historical Perspective." That's what I get from a footnote in Phillips book. Can I dig a little further and get their first names?
Ah, yes. The first names are Michael and Dani respectively. And that is Michael Gavin pictured above.
Dani Rodrik -- who is of Turkish origin (if my memory serves me right) -- is actually the better known of the two. He is mostly a mainstream neoclassical economist, but he is not blind to the limitations of that school. He has written several popular works on economics, where he discusses both the strengths and the weaknesses of the discipline. (Also, from my not-always-reliable memory: I remember that he was with the Institute of Advanced Studies [Princeton] for a while, but left that place some time back.)
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for this.
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