From the other side, though, free marketeers accuse both institutions of encouraging government intervention in developing economics where overregulation has discouraged private investment and initiative. IMF demands for budget discipline have often produced steep tax hikes on already-contracting economies, which conventional economic theory suggests would exacerbate a slowdown.
Ed Lotterman, a columnist at the Pioneer Press of St. Paul, Minnesota and former economist for the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank who has worked on development projects in Latin America, said that the shift from bombed-out Europe to developing countries left the World Bank continuing to do what it knew how to do.
For years, the bank was neglecting the human capital -- education and health care -- that was underdeveloped in the Third World while overemphasizing the same heavy infrastructure that had been needed in Europe.
"There was this implicit assumption that that's also what Brazil and Zaire needed," Lotterman said. "Well, it's not what they needed."
The institutions have also critiqued themselves.
Vijayendra Rao was one of two World Bank economists who co-edited Culture and Public Action, a book arguing that culture must be considered along with economics when designing anti-poverty and development programs.
"What we're arguing for is a much more participatory dialogue," Rao said. "It should be more listening than telling."
He offered two examples from the book.
During a famine among the Dinka ethnic group of Sudan in 1998, aid workers found that old women were giving their consignments of grain to their clan chiefs. The relief workers perceived it as looting, a case of the elites capturing scarce resources.
But the Dinka were following a redistributive principle of sharing resources equally within the kinship group.
"An anthropologist in the field was telling [the aid workers] these things," Rao said, "and they weren't listening."
Noting the shift by the development agencies from their original mandates, Lotterman suggested that a "Bretton Woods II" meeting to re-evaluate their functions is long overdue.
"Sixty years have passed. Let's explicitly talk about what we should do," he said. "I don't think given the world leadership that's likely to happen, but it would be good."
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