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

What does governance mean for the World Bank (WB) and how far does the organization influence the world community with this concept? The World Bank primarily focused on economic aspects of governance in the 1980s and progressively moved to its political dimensions in 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. In addition the academic relationships that the organization built to shape the ‘good governance’ concept are explored. As well as networking, which contributes to the promotion of its worldwide influence, the soft and hard powers of the Bank are seen at work through aid allocation systems. The potential influence of the main WB’s governance indicators (CPIA, WGI and Doing Business) is depicted through what donors claim, 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). According to the donor we look at, empirical results do not reject strong covariations between new commitments and the CPIA or the WGI.