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).