The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has a long history of intellectual independence. This article details how Western countries tried to marginalise the organisation and its work – which is often critical of Western powers – during the 2012 UNCTAD conference. While developing...

According to the purist view development policy amounts to the pursuit of its main objective as against those of foreign, economic and agricultural policy, i. e., to ensure that donor interests should give way as far as possible to this target. It is however self-evident that “practical...

The lending criteria applied by the IMF and the World Bank have been converging for some time. Considering also that since the floating of exchange rates in the early seventies the IMF seems to have lost in importance as a monetary institution, debate is growing on the question of whether the...

Although the main responsibility for carrying out economic reforms in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe lies with these countries themselves, the transformation of the Soviet-style economic system into a market economy must be made easier by support from abroad. In this the...

Now in its second year of operation, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development was the first new institution set up by the West to cope with the historical challenge of helping to transform the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe into market economies. Strongly criticized...

There has been an impressive proliferation of non-governmental organizations in development cooperation in the last two decades. The main reason for this has been the belief - among both experts and the public at large - that NGOs have a number of advantages over the state sector when it comes...