The multilateral banks are powerful forces in the international community, providing loans of more than $250 billion to developing countries over the last half-century. The best known of these, the World Bank, has been studied extensively, but the 'regional development banks' are little understood even within their own geographic regions. This volume describes the difficulties faced by the Inter-American Development Bank since the 1960s and its role and new objectives in the 1990s.

• List of Tables and Figures ix
• Foreword, Osvaldo Sunkel xi
• Preface, Roy Culpeper xiii
• Acknowledgments xv
• List of Acronyms xvii
• 1 Introduction 1
• The Contribution of the Inter-American Development
• Bank in Historical Perspective, 2
• The Borrowing Member Countries, 7
• The Way Forward, 9
• Part 1 Historical Setting and Record of Performance
• 2 A Brief History of the Bank 17
• Institutional Framework, 17
• 3 Evolution of the Lending Program 35
• Basic Operational Policies, 35
• Resources, 37
• Country Allocations, 42
• Sectoral Distribution, 46
• Regional Economic Collapse, 51
• 4 Borrowing Country Experience 57
• Country Studies, 57
• Part 2 Development Agenda
• 5 Loan Performance and Institutional Governance 79
• Experience Under the Low-Income Goal, 80
• New Institutional Organization, 87
• Loan Quality, 90
• 6 Comparative Advantage and Regional Leadership 95
• Relations with the World Bank, 96
• Development of Policy-Based Lending, 103
• Social Sector Lending, 120
• Regional Leadership, 114
• 7 Resource Mobilization and Portfolio Management 121
• Resource Flows, 222
• IDB's Portfolio, 224
• Participation of the IDB in the Region's Recovery, 228
• Mobilization of Concessional Resources, 232
• Operational Efficiency, 234
• 8 Looming Development Challenges for the Bank 139
• Poverty and Inequality, 240
• The Private Sector, 142
• Regional Integration and Cooperation, 145
• Role of the State and Institution Building, 147
• Bibliography 151
• Index 155
• About the Book and Author 165

Diana Tussie
Diana Tussie is senior research fellow at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO) in Argentina. She is coeditor (with David Glover) of The Developing Countries in World Trade: Policies and Bargaining Strategies (Lynne Rienner, 1993).