The World Bank itself defines development as promoting ‘economic and political freedom’, and ‘freedom of choice’.57 This claim is very familiar to us. Yet the history outlined above suggests the opposite. Interventions by the World Bank and the IMF in the name of development have shifted political power away from democratically elected decision-making bodies and placed it in the hands of remote, unelected bureaucrats. Economic and political freedom has been attacked, ironically, in the name of economic and political freedom.
