Why revisit conditionality? The tension between country ownership and conditionality emerged as a central issue in the debates about policy-based lending. Over the past quarter century, the development community has learned from the experience with policy-based lending around the world. Among the most important lessons are that conditionality cannot substitute ownership. The approach to conditionality has shifted away from the old model of the 1980s, but has not yet settled on a new one. While there is now generally more recognition of the importance of ownership, a stronger focus on...

In 'At the Frontlines of Development' former World Bank country directors recount their experiences, both as managers of the World Bank's programs in global economic hotspots of the 1990s as well as throughout their careers in development economics. These essays detail, among many stories of development in the 1990s, how China and India lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, while Russia collapsed; how Bosnia and Herzegovina and Mozambique remade their war-ravaged economies; and how Thailand, Turkey, and Argentina fell into financial crisis. These remarkable stories, told in first-person...

This book is part of a larger effort undertaken by the World Bank to understand the development experience of the 1990s, an extraordinary eventful decade. Each of the project's three volumes serves a different purpose. 'Development Challenges in the 1990s: Leading Policymakers Speak from Experience' offers insights on the practical concerns faced by policymakers, while 'At the Frontlines of Development: Reflections from the World Bank' considers the operational implications of the decade for the World Bank as an institution. This volume, 'Economic Growth in the 1990s: Learning from a Decade...