After Structural Adjustment, Then What? Lending Selectivity by the World Bank

The World Bank has been at the forefront of a redefinition of aid conditionality since the late 1990s. This has implied a change from providing finance in return for the promise of policy reforms, as was typical under structural adjustment, to a disbursement of funds conditional on the reforms that a country has already achieved. The latter practice has become known as aid ‘selectivity ’ or performance-based aid. When aid flows are allocated selectively, donors set conditions on the policies and institutions of countries prior to disbursing aid. So funds are withheld from countries until they obligingly change their policies or institutions. The World Bank’s selectivity in aid allocations is based on an assessment tool called the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA). The CPIA is derived from the judgment of World Bank staff on a country’s performance on a set of macroeconomic, structural, social and governance criteria. See below a listing of the CPIA’s 16 components, grouped in four clusters