sed more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization."
The World Bank in 1991, after paying $7 billion in interest and fees to its investors and bankers, had a $1.2 billion surplus and a rate of return that commercial banks would envy. In 1991, the bank decided to contribute $267 million to its soft-loan affiliate, which lends to very poor countries at concessional rates, $29 million to the Global Environment Trust Fund, and the remaining $904 million went to its retained earnings, which now stands at $11.9 billion. According to Unicef, preventing vitamin-A-deficiency blindness would cost $6 million. Preventing a great majority of childhood malnutrition deaths would cost $2.5 billion--but the bank prefers to add to its surplus instead.
In recent years, the bank has moved away from project-oriented lending--power plants and dams--and toward structural adjustment lending, in which credit is conditional on adoption of a standard austerity-deregulation package. Not surprisingly, these projects have savage effects, to which the bank has a ready answer--more loans. The bank is lending its clients more money to treat the poverty, social dislocation, and environmental damage that earlier loans helped create. The bank funds greenhouse-gas reduction schemes in countries where the greenhouse-gas producers were initially financed by the World Bank.
While many called for Summers resignation after his internal memo was leaked to the press, whether he resigns will have no affect on the waste products industry. The practice of shipping toxic wastes will continue. Indeed, Greenpeace regularly documents its trail all over the world: German (per capita income; $20,440) plastic to Argentina ($2,160), U.S. ($20,910) mercury to South Africa ($2,540), and car batteries from everywhere to Brazil ($2,540). Furthermore, plastic dropped into recycling bins is likely to be shipped to Malaysia.
In other countries,...