Mirek Hosman
This doctoral research project analyzes the construction of economic expertise at the World Bank in the 1960s, during the so-called Development Decade. At that time, the Bank rapidly hired over 200 economists, which not only increased the size of the Bank by 25%, but significantly changed the professional profile of the institution dominated until then by bankers and technical engineers. Contrary to the view of the Bank as an agent of economic orthodoxy and later as an engine of the neoliberal agenda, the project argues that the organization was much more open to considering heterodox proposals, including Prebisch-style structuralist policies. In fact, not only did the Bank economists contribute to the elaboration of proposals commonly associated with UNCTAD, CEPAL, and later the New International Economic Order (NIEO) agenda – they were oftentimes their leading international advocates. The project analyzes a number of these proposals – from devising international buffer stock facilities, stabilizing commodity prices at artificially augmented levels, to advocacy for a larger reliance on concessional funds and multilateral coordination of financial aid programs – together with their institutional trajectories and agency of their proponents like Irving Friedman, Andrew Kamarck and Dragoslav Avramović. This doctoral research project reconstructs the intricacies of the ascendance of economists at the World Bank and explicates the process through which the Bank became one of the foundational institutions of the world economy, with a noteworthy influence on the practice of international development and its theoretical reflection, namely in the field of development economics. By relying on newly declassified and previously untapped documents from 15 archives from around the world, the research offers a deeply revisionist analysis of the political economy of the World Bank in the 1960s.