Global Policy Forum

Agencies Claim Poverty Document was Censored

By Charlotte Denny

A World Bank report trailed as the most detailed ever investigation into global poverty was last night under heavy fire from development charities who accused the bank of censoring the radical conclusions of an earlier version.

Aid agencies said that criticisms of orthodox economic policies from a draft published on the web in January had been removed from the final version of the bank's world development report, published last night.

"It is a comprehensive overhaul in which much of the draft's critique of conventional bank thinking has been replaced by an apologia for business as usual," said Duncan Green, policy analyst at Cafod, the Catholic aid agency.

The original author of the report, Professor Ravi Kanbur, resigned in June, after what friends described as a disagreement with the more orthodox economists at the bank over his insistence that redistributive taxation policies and social spending were vital in tackling global poverty.

The bank last night denied charges of censorship, and said that the key messages of Prof Kanbur's draft had survived the editing process. The final report argues that economic growth is crucial but often not sufficient to improve living standards in poor countries. It advocates a three-prong approach of expanding economic opportunities for the poor, while empowering them and providing security against social and economic shocks.

"There' s no censorship at all, what we've had is a process of consultation since we placed the January version on the web," said Professor Nick Stern, the bank's chief economist. "In that process, we have made revisions but the central messages [from the January draft] of opportunity, empowerment, and security are still driving the whole thing."

However aid agencies said the radical tone of Prof Kanbur's January draft had been watered down, and the standard Bank messages about the importance of economic reform, strengthened.

Prof Kanbur's draft criticised free market reforms advocated by the bank and the International Monetary Fund, which it says have harmed poor people in some countries. The final version of the report omits most of the sections describing the downside of market reforms and concentrates on their benefits for economic growth.

The January draft blamed rapid opening of financial markets for the crisis which swept through Asia three years ago and advocated countries using capital controls to stem speculative flows of capital. In the final version of the report, the section on capital flows has been cut down to a line recommending a "cautious approach" to the process of liberalising financial markets and using capital controls as a transition measure.

"On balance, I'd say this is a clear case of intellectual censorship," said Mr Green.

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