Existing scholarship has analyzed the NIEO from the perspectives of developed and developing countries, but scant attention has been paid to actors positioned between north and south. This paper helps rectify this deficiency by providing an account of the World Bank’s response to the NIEO. The NIEO presented a significant challenge to the Bank, an intergovernmental organization tasked with promoting global economic development. The NIEO ran counter to the Bank’s development philosophy and ties to the United States government. As a result, the Bank largely avoided debates over the NIEO. Instead, the organization’s management sought to mollify southern governments by increasing the Bank’s lending and by promoting an alternative vision of economic reform centered on global poverty alleviation. As such, the NIEO accelerated ongoing transformations in the Bank’s development strategy.
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