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What is the World Bank? Created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, the World Bank Group is comprised of five agencies that make loans or guarantee credit to 177 member countries.
PRAGUE -- In a day of protests that were more colorful than violent, 9,000 demonstrators surrounded Prague's Congress Center where the World Bank and IMF are holding their annual meeting.
If you ask a Mexican farmer, Indian civil servant, Filipina garment worker, Bolivian miner or South African student what structural adjustment is, chances are they would be able to explain IMF and World Bank mandated belt tightening because their lives have been touched by it.
PRAGUE -- Yehoshua Tzarfati has a chilling story to tell. He came to Prague to help as a medic during this week's World Bank/IMF demonstrations.
The final day of the World Bank/IMF protests ranged from stand offs between protestors and police, an obsession with violence on the part of the media, and excitement and hopefulness from organizers and activists.
Dr. Vineeta Gupta is a physician and human rights activist based in Punjab, India. She has focused her efforts on World Bank efforts to privatize healthcare in Punjab. According to Dr. Gupta, the result of World Bank policies has not been greater access to healthcare.
Scholar Walden Bello says a Bush presidency is bad news for the Bank and the Fund.
The ''report of the international financial institution advisory commission'' sounds so innocuous. It is not. In the current US debate, it will be explosive. The question is whether it will end with pure destruction or efficient replacements for the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and regional development banks of today.
Kenyan human rights activists are adding their voices to those already opposed to the World Bank driven land reforms, which they say, seek to make land "just another commodity" to be subjected to the whims of market forces, at the expense of millions of landless peasants.
President Fernando de la Rua's most pressing problem is a cash crunch, in large part a result of interest payments coming due on $144 billion in foreign debt. Investors are concerned that the $280 billion economy cannot grow enough to stay solvent.
Their target in Washington is the spring meetings of the Bank and International Monetary Fund, which begin next Sunday. The protest campaign against the sister institutions begins tomorrow with the launch an international campaign to persuade corporate investors not to buy World Bank bonds.
The International Monetary Fund has retracted criticism of Brazil's anti-poverty plan in the wake of national indignation and calls for IMF representative Lorenzo Perez to be kicked out of the country.
Thailand -- The outgoing chief of the International Monetary Fund got a rude retirement present Sunday when an American anti-free trade activist penetrated security at a trade conference and hit him with a pie in the face.
Mozambique, hit by the worst floods in 30 years, is having to pay $1.4 million a week in debt service, the Jubilee 2000 Coalition revealed in a statement to the press on 23rd February.
During the past few days a good deal of coverage has been focused on the Meltzer Commission Report on the International Financial Institutions, and what it might mean for the World Bank. Let me take this opportunity to lay out some real concerns that we at the bank have, and also to set the record straight.
Leaders of the Southern Africa Development Community Tuesday called on the international community to cancel all foreign debts owed by Mozambique.
But these jujitsu tactics may be running out of steam. Political momentum against the IMF ratcheted up in recent weeks, when the Meltzer Commission, a bipartisan advisory commission to the U.S. Congress, released its report.
Up to 10,000 people gathered in downtown Sofia on Wednesday to protest the country's unemployment, poverty and temporary-employment contracts.
In his first media interview since his party's landslide win in the Jan. 6 national election, telecommunications tycoon Thaksin Shinawatra also said his government would try to soften the ''tough'' terms imposed on Thailand by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).