Assessing the World Bank’s influence on the good governance paradigm

Abstract

What does governance mean for the World Bank and to what extent does the organization succeed in diffusing the paradigm worldwide? The World Bank primarily focused on economic aspects of governance in the 1980s, and progressively moved to its political dimensions towards the end of 1990s. The paper discusses the reasons for this global shift and its consistency with regard to the values of the liberal society. Bibliometric methods are used to evaluate the role of the Bank as a producer of knowledge on this specific issue. The potential influence of the World Bank’s main governance indicators: Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA), Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) and Doing Business, is depicted through what donors claim when allocating aid, and beyond rhetoric, through what correlations suggest. For each of the main international donors, cross-sectional econometric regressions are run on large samples of developing countries (2005-2008). Depending on the donor we look at, empirical results do not reject strong covariations between new aid commitments and the CPIA, and to a lesser extent with the WGI.The World Bank, governance, liberal society, soft power, aid commitments