Case Study: Assistance to the Transition Countries
Author(s)
Ellerman, David
Abstract
My primary purpose is to lay the intellectual foundations for an alternative philosophy of development assistance. For concrete examples (mostly negative), I have focused on the “case study” of the World Bank and to a lesser extent the other large multilateral and bilateral agencies (e.g., IMF and USAID). The transition from communism to a private property market economy presented a unique challenge to the major development assistance agencies. A new regional development bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), was also established to help meet the challenge. My purpose in this chapter is to discuss the propensities of the development agencies by examining how they tried to meet the challenge of privatization in the transition countries of Europe and Central Asia during the 1990s.
