کمک توسعه و سیاست های بین المللی: آیا عضویت در شورای امنیت سازمان ملل تاثیری در تصمیمات بانک جهانی دارد؟

We investigate whether elected members of the UN Security Council receive favorable treatment from the World Bank, using panel data for 157 countries over the period 1970–2004. Our results indicate a robust positive relationship between temporary UN Security Council membership and the number of World Bank projects a country receives, even after accounting for economic and political factors, as well as regional, country and year effects. The size of World Bank loans, however, is not affected by UN Security Council membership.

Founded in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, the World Bank was created to help rebuild war torn Europe. In the years following its inception, the focus of the World Bank gradually shifted to developing countries. Today it is the primary international institution responsible for promoting economic development in the world. Sponsoring projects of various scopes in both emerging market countries as well as the world's poorest countries, in 2006 alone the World Bank provided $23.6 billion in loans and grants through 279 projects around the globe. Critics (e.g. Easterly, 2005) allege that the World Bank has fallen far short of its goals of improving living standards and reducing poverty. Many argue that failure is due to the imposition of misguided policy conditions through the development projects. One possible reason for this is that instead of enforcing sound development policies, the World Bank has been used as a tool of foreign policy to funnel money to corrupt governments in strategic positions who ally themselves with the major shareholders of the World Bank — the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. The World Bank itself freely admits that during the Cold War its lending was politically driven.1 With only a few notable exceptions, however, researchers have not systematically investigated this claim. Do international political imperatives guide the so-called development lending of the World Bank? Anecdotes are plentiful, but only Schneider et al. (1985), Frey and Schneider (1986) and, more recently, Andersen et al. (2006) and Dreher and Sturm (2006) put this question to a large-n test. They use clever proxies to capture the importance of developing countries to the major shareholders of the World Bank, such as the quantity of exports from major shareholders to developing countries, their former colonial status, and voting patterns at the United Nations General Assembly. 2 These studies present some evidence that political imperatives do influence the Bank. In this paper, we offer the first systematic study analyzing a new measure of the international importance of a country: temporary membership on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Recent evidence indicates the importance of temporary UNSC members to powerful countries. Kuziemko and Werker (2006) find that US foreign aid increases when countries serve on the UNSC, as does UN Development Program aid, and Dreher et al. (2006) find that the ten temporary members of the UNSC are more likely to receive IMF assistance than other countries. They attribute these increases in various forms of foreign aid to vote-trading activities: temporary members can trade their Security Council votes for cash. There is reason to believe that foreign aid is not only provided to help countries in economic distress but also to achieve the donor's political objectives. In fact, since the late 1940s, every US administration considered foreign aid to be important in achieving foreign policy goals (Ruttan, 1996). It has even been claimed that the primary purpose of US economic assistance is in promoting overall US policy objectives (Zimmermann, 1993). According to Morgenthau (1962: 302), “the transfer of money and services from one government to another performs here the function of a price paid for political services rendered or to be rendered.” Our question is whether World Bank lending is used by the institution's major shareholders for a similar purpose. While nearly all countries in the world are members of the World Bank and all have votes, these votes are pegged to economic size, and the G7, for example, has an inordinate amount of power at the Bank as a result. They control well over 40% of the votes. When they coordinate, they have veto power over certain important decisions that require supermajorities. Alone they constitute a near majority, and need the support of only a handful of allies to guarantee control of the Bank's loans and grants to developing countries. Clearly they control the World Bank. Do they use this control purely to help developing countries in need or do international politics also play a role in how they choose to guide the development institution? To anticipate our results, we find that temporary Security Council membership does increase the number of World Bank projects a country receives. The qualitative results are robust to the inclusion of economic and political factors, as well as regional, country, and year specific effects. We proceed as follows. The next section provides some background on the UNSC and the World Bank and develops our hypothesis. Section 3 presents anecdotal evidence, while Section 4 presents rigorous analysis of large-n data where we test alternative hypotheses. We discuss extensions in Section 5. Section 6 concludes.

Our results contribute to the growing literature showing that International Financial Institutions have been employed as a tool of foreign policy by their major shareholders. Whether used to bribe or reward, the World Bank's projects have been funneled to politically important developing countries, such as those serving a term on the UN Security Council. Given the nature of our large-n study, we do not know who took the initiative – whether the temporary UNSC members increased their requests for projects, having increased confidence the World Bank would accept – or, alternatively, whether the Bank's major shareholders took initiative. In any case, the projects of the World Bank are one mechanism by which the major stakeholders of the Bank – mainly the US, but also Japan, Germany, France and the United Kingdom – can win the favor of voting members of the UN Security Council. This is not what the institution was intended to be used for. Originally, the World Bank was set up to promote development. Many blame the failure of World Bank projects, which involve both loans and policy conditions designed to promote development and reduce poverty, on the design of programs and on the failure of countries to adopt World Bank reforms.43 Additionally, previous research suggests the pernicious effects of politically motivated foreign aid. The World Bank often subsidizes inefficient policies and corrupt governments, and long-run economic prosperity suffers (e.g., Easterly, 2005). Thus, part of the failure of the World Bank may be that its loans have not been exclusively used to promote development in the first place. Nevertheless, we hesitate to jump to the conclusion that the two institutions should be reformed. Regarding the UNSC, perhaps we can view temporary membership on the UNSC as a mechanism of international redistribution. Here is one way of viewing the institution in light of our analysis: almost all countries get their turn to participate in the important deliberations of the UN Security Council, and, when they do, they receive perks in the form of World Bank loans so long as they play ball with the truly powerful countries in the world and do not rock the boat. Their role in most deliberations may be practically inconsequential, but they rise to prominence on the international stage and are duly rewarded for their service. As for reforming the World Bank, we should be cautious. It may be that the very prospect of manipulating the World Bank for political goals is a necessary condition for its major shareholders to lend their financial support to the international institution. If the World Bank can use some of its resources to promote development – perhaps more often in politically important countries – this may be a fine arrangement.44 Moreover, if the international political goals of the countries controlling the Bank are laudable (e.g., to pass Security Council decisions promoting human rights), it is arguable that the overall costs of the vote-trading are not substantial.45 So, perhaps the political manipulation of international institutions is a necessary evil to engage the participation of powerful countries in international cooperation. Even if non-politically motivated aid might be preferable to politically motivated aid, this may not be a realistic alternative. The alternative to a world with politically manipulated international institutions may simply be a world without international institutions. One must therefore weigh the costs of political manipulation against the benefits of having various institutions that facilitate multilateral deliberations. With the above caveats in mind, our suggestions for reform are conservative. We do suspect there is room for improvement, to the extent that long-run economic gains matter more than short-run political gains. Perhaps much like central banks are isolated from the vagaries of day to day politics, the World Bank can be reformed to provide Executive Directors with a little more independence from political pressures and still provide the major shareholders with enough voice to maintain their support of the institution. With this in mind, consider the governance of the World Bank. Some reformers call for a redistribution of vote shares so that recipient countries have a greater voice.46 Adjusting vote shares, however, would not change the fact that the World Bank can still be used to achieve foreign policy objectives; it would just change the players who get to use the World Bank to pursue foreign policy objectives. Others argue that the World Bank should shift from reliance on the IBRD to the IDA (e.g. the Meltzer Commission, 2000, Rogoff, 2004 and Lerrick, 2007). This would focus the World Bank's attention on low-income countries instead of emerging market countries. It would also change where it gets its resources from.47 As mentioned above, the IBRD raises most of its funds on international financial markets, while the IDA relies much more heavily on the resources of major shareholders. Increased reliance on shareholder resources could make the Bank even more beholden to their short-term political goals, unless other reforms are also taken. Thus we suggest the World Bank's main governing body – the Executive Board – might be more effective if it had some increased degree of insulation from short-term political goals. The Directors who sit on the World Bank Executive Board could be appointed for long, non-renewable terms. Certainly, they would and should still represent the interests of their specific countries, but they might resist pressure to pursue some projects that are short-sighted and motivated purely by politics.