Negative Impacts of Undemocratic Development Essay

Negative Impacts of Undemocratic Development - Essay Example These financial institutions include the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank. The World Bank’s mandate originally incorporated provision of long term loans for reconstruction which has been enhanced since the 1970’s to financing and supporting multimillion dollar infrastructure projects in developing countries. Being exclusively largest source of development finance in the world, the World Bank intends to provide loans for wide changes in infrastructure and economy, long-term development and poverty reduction and many other projects such as constructing dams, roads, extracting natural resources etc. The World Bank has a leading impact on the livelihoods of millions of people living in most part of the world in a way that the bank finances commercial projects of really low income countries which are unable to acquire commercial loans from any other source. It is even criticized for imposing neoliberal policies that are highly undemocratic on developing countries. This paper analyses the negative impacts of undemocratic policies of the World Bank on sustainable development of developing countries and argues the development strategy of the World Bank should be democratic enough to meet their developmental objectives effectively and efficiently. The World Bank has been playing dual but contradictory roles; one is of a political organization and second is that of a practical organization. On one hand, the World Bank must satisfy the demands of lending and borrowing governments, other international organizations, and private capital markets as a political organization. On the other hand as an action-oriented organization, it must be neutral and specialized in loans, development aid, and technical assistance. The World Bank's responsibilities to donor countries and private capital markets have induced it to acquire policies which prescribe that poverty is best relieved by the implementation of free-market policies (Weaver 2008). Developing nations attempt to increase their economic output (GDP) by involving themselves in and simultaneously competing with the worldwide economy. Such countries are financially insecure and undeveloped industries are disabled to participate in global competition as the so-called competitive free-market is inherently unfair and biased. Since developing nations determine their inability to make investment in growth-promoting policies by having lack of sufficient foreign currency reserves due to their expenditure of the reserves on imports and debt repayments. In order to facilitate economic growth and development, the developing nations may chose to borrow money from the World Bank to finance large development projects as such projects may help gain their development goals. The World Bank has important associations with corporations especially in United States, to contract them for these remunerative projects. By undertaking the projects, these corporations gain immense profits, but the poor countries have t o bear an additional debt burden. The borrowing countries even lose control over their primal natural resources and a huge part of revenue from these resources because of repatriation of profits abroad. Before granting loans and debt relief, the World Bank imposes several conditions on the recipient governments for the reform of various aspects such as their lack of transparency, far-flung corruption and undemocratic authorities. Nevertheless the World Bank is confronted