The feud (as such) between Wolfowitz's ideological crew and (what seems to me to be) most of the rest of the World Bank is, when you think about it, as facile as most public debates in the United States tend to be. As a platitude, "we should not give money to corrupt regimes" sounds perfectly fine. But we make similar pronouncements about promoting "democracies" all the time when it's fairly obvious that--aside from western democracies--this is really code for "American allies that have some tenuous similarities to real democracies."
So at the end of the day, unless a more concrete standard is erected, what "corruption" means in this debate is either mostly arbitrary, or mostly politically motivated, but certainly not very helpful. It either implicates countries that score poorly on one of any number of corruption indices, or it implicates countries that are corrupt in ways that Paul Wolfowitz thinks are important, but there's no way to know if these are one and the same, or if one standard is better than the other, or if either is any good.
In America, corruption means accepting bribes from defense and intelligence contractors and maybe hiding those bribes in a freezer. In China it might mean a similar thing but to a much, much greater extent. In the Congo it might mean directly stealing public money. And filching a significant amount of public money probably has a much larger impact in the Congo than it does in China or in the United States. But, if you're going to exempt corrupt countries from receiving World Bank funds, it's still unclear what metrics to use and where to draw the line.
What William Easterly advocates is actually a bit more sophisticated. He ignores ideologically complicated metrics like corruption and argues instead that we ought only fund third world programs that have proven to be successful. In the end, though, figuring out what "works" has complications similar to figuring out what is "too corrupt." But it has, it seems to me, an additional problem in that, in order to figure out which relief projects work in the third world, you have to see which relief projects work in the third world. And if you want a broad set of options, that requires funding projects--even projects that may not work--in the first place.
Yet at the same time, giving money unquestioningly to countries like Iraq or the Congo--from where I sit, knowing very little--seems kind of silly. Fortunately, there are people out there who know more than me. Many of them work at the World Bank, and many of them seem not-too-terribly dispirited by the thought that 15-20 percent of the money they dole out will end up in the pockets of corrupt or dangerous people. Conceivably that's because they know that 80-85 percent of that money (as opposed to--on Wolfowitz's terms--none of it) will still get to where it belongs. And conceivably, if they thought that their measures were failures, they wouldn't continue working at the World Bank. And they wouldn't be so hard on James Wolfensohn and Paul Wolfowitz for changing things around.
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