How has the language of World Bank reports changed?

by  Tyler Cowen in

From The New Left Review, Moretti and Pestre report:

Three new semantic clusters characterize the language of the Bank from the early 1990s on. The first—and most important—has to do with finance: here, alongside a few predictable adjectives (financial, fiscal, economic) and nouns (loans, investment, growth, interest, lending, debt), we find a landslide of fair value, portfolio, derivative, accrual, guarantees, losses, accounting, assets; a little further down the list, equity, hedging, liquidity, liabilities, creditworthiness, default, swaps, clients, deficit, replenishment, repurchase, cash. In terms of frequency and semantic density, this cluster can only be compared to the material infrastructures of the 1950s–60s; now, however, work in agriculture and industry has been replaced by an overwhelming predominance of financial activities.

…The second cluster has to do with management—a noun that, in absolute terms, is the second most frequent of the last decade (lower than loans, but higher than risk and investment!). In the world of ‘management’, people have goals and agendas; faced with opportunities, challenges and critical situations, they elaborate strategies. To appreciate the novelty, let’s recall that, in the 1950s–60s, issues were studied by experts who surveyed and conducted missions, published reports, assisted, advised and suggested programmes. With the advent of management, the centre of gravity shifts towards focusing, strengthening and implementing; one must monitor, control, audit, rate (Figure 2); ensure that everything is done properly while also helping people to learn from mistakes. The many tools at the manager’s disposal (indicators, instruments, knowledge, expertise, research) enhance effectiveness, efficiency, performance, competitiveness and—it goes without saying—promote innovation.

The concept of governance is another clear winner in more recent times, and furthermore the reports seem to overuse the word “and” relative to the word “the.”  That I can believe.  The article is interesting throughout, hat tip goes to Avinash Celstine.

Comments

Dismalist

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The technical term is "Bullshit", and it has never changed.

April Harding

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The paper is indeed fascinating. I hope they will take the analysis a bit further, by teaming up with someone familiar with the recent operational history of the World Bank, The linguistic analysis by itself is more provocative than insightful.

david

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The 1969 quote is instructive: it straightforwardly advocates growing cash crops for export in an incautious way. The World Bank does not yet have to contend with hordes of screaming activists decrying cash crops as neocolonialism; it is taken as obvious that everyone who matters agrees on cash crops. It is the ignition of attempts at third world trading blocs or even autarky (along with their noisy cheerleaders in the First World) that breaks this easy consensus.

The review does allude to the transformation:

... as the 1960s come to a close, it becomes clear that, if building infrastructure is relatively simple, its reliable long-term operation is not: it requires specialists, qualified workers and the regular supply of key products like electricity—none of which can be taken for granted in the countries of the South. To make things worse, international exchanges seem to respect neither the Bank’s hopes, nor the theories of development à la Rostow. The prices of agricultural raw materials—crucial for the economies of the South—are far from stable and undergo major falls, from which recovery is difficult. The consequences of such instability can be dramatic: as prices drop, developing countries cannot afford to persevere on the virtuous path by which the export of raw materials finances the growth of infrastructure . . . and the repayment of foreign loans. Mindful of its investments, the Bank is worried...

But, I think, elides the important point that "everyone" (especially Americans) thought that removing the European colonial boot would permit stable governments pursuing much the same favoured European growth path (and conversely that Western Europe without its colonies would nonetheless feel morally obligated to open its markets to former colonies on equally favourable terms), only with even faster prosperity in the absence of colonial extraction. It was the case that specialists, qualified workers, and the regular supply of electricity was therefore taken for granted. Why wouldn't that have been a reasonable assumption in the part of the Bank? The New Left Review neglects to say. It suggests that the Bank merely carelessly muted its concern over repayment before reviving it as payments failed to materialize - the historically disastrous embrace of import substitution even as agricultural productivity in the West exploded is erased from the narrative.

Diana

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I helped develop the Topical Taxonomy the World Bank uses for autocategorization and built an early phase of its offical internal Thesaurus, so I am particularly familiar with the language of the Bank and its content.

For one thing, the authors seem to have only analyzed the Bank's Annual Reports. The Annual Report is perhaps the most high-level document the Bank produces. That it includes a high proportion of "nominalizations" has a lot to do with the general nature of its content. But this is a document intended for the Board of Directors and the public at large. It does not represent the Bank's work at anything but the highest level and in the broadest terms. For this, there are also vast, project-specific documents, for which I would love to see an external semantic analysis. For one thing, it would do a lot to shed light on my own work.

In fact, my work had a lot to do with the development of the Bank's standard language and the results the authors are seeing. Our text mining and search capabilities became much more sophisticated during my time, and have continued to do so. We tagged our documents initially by term frequency using a series of topical profiles. People within the Bank were aware that using a single piece of preferred jargon over and over would affect its tags and ranking. This was a problem our program attempted to fix during my time there, but people's habits change more slowly than text mining technology. However, a tendency to use "poverty reduction" over "reduction of poverty" does not render the two non-equivalent, as the authors conclude.

Also, the increased managerial tone of the past 25 years has a lot to do with improved internal safeguarding procedures and increased oversight. As the authors note, the Bank has also made a shift away from concrete, physical development projects and into areas with complex and inscrutable regulatory landscapes, such as finance and anti-corruption. The Annual Report is describing hundreds of such projects in a concise manner for an audience of non-experts, so naturally details are sparse and one comes away feeling like there is no "there" there. But anyone wishing to find out about the Bank's actual, specific accomplishments in these areas would never consult the Annual Report. A more detailed view of these projects (which do, mind you, have goals, benchmarks, a beginning, a middle, and an end) would be found in the related project documents, required fiscal reports, and in the voluminous research generated by affiliated specialists. This amounts to millions of documents, many of which have only been made public recently as part of a policy of increased transparency. However, there has been a database of well over 100,000 high-value, human-curated project documents publicly available for many years. To gain a real understanding of the World Bank, a much larger corpus of representative documents would need to be analyzed.

That said, the author's conclusions are in some senses valid. The World Bank is, in many ways, its own insular universe with its own logic and structure. But in this sense it's no different from any other large institution with a relatively long history, thousands of employees, and a wide geographic distribution. Many of its resources have become increasingly inwardly-directed in an effort to prevent the kinds of corruption and inefficiency that marked various phases of its existence. It's made up of overwhelmingly decent people attempting to deal with some terribly thorny problems, problems for which there are virtually infinite variables and minimal metrics. Building dams was easy, but often had unintended negative consequences. Creating lasting change that reduces human suffering involves a range of ideological and practical problems, and the Bank is one of the few places left prepared to hire genuine experts to study them.

The World Bank is, in general, moving away from its past as a financial institution loaning money to build dams and roads to becoming a research clearinghouse. When I was there, I heard that leaders of the new nation of South Sudan called to inquire about how many hospitals they had, since no one else had this kind of information. There were exciting things in the works just as I was leaving; there is a real push within the Bank to harness the democratization of technology that has preceded what we used to call "the basics" in many areas, making it easier for locals to participate in directing policy and reporting violations and exploitation. Breaking down the barriers between Bank administrators and the people ("clients") they serve is at the top of the agenda. Is the World Bank a perfect place? No. But it doesn't have an easy job. And analyzing its Annual Reports is far from the best way to determine what it is actually doing.

Stellen

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sorry... helping create dense bureaucratise for a completely superficial international agency is not a positive credential to most people. However, it is probably highly valued in government agencies generally.

Clear, honest communications do not prompt semantic deciphering, as is the topic here.

whatsthat

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You might want to consider why bureaucracies in general have a certain kind of language.

Rich Berger

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Why do "we" need the World Bank at all?

Stellen

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Not needed at all and decidedly harmful.

World Bank is a wasteful, secretive multilateral agency siphoning Billion$ from taxpayers each year. It generally engages in unprofitable loans with conscripted capital, protected from normal market forces. It is a corrupt, well staffed/paid bureaucracy with crony commercial firms as primary beneficiaries.
Other than those tiny blemishes, it is a wonderful boon to mankind.

Paul Cadario

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Stellen, almost nothing in your comment is grounded in fact. The World Bank faces many governance challenges owing largely from the USA's failure to be a responsible major shareholder.

On the language, there are many other documents, it is true. But the Annual Report is the document that's 'the face' of the Bank. Its language reflects what the owners of the Bank have told it to do.

sopot toptrendy festiwal 2015

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