The World Bank and the politics of productivity: The debate on economic growth, poverty, and living standards in the 1950s

According to most reconstructions of development debates, poverty and social issues were not part of the development agenda until the 1960s. This paper shows, instead, that development practitioners and institutions addressed poverty and social issues already in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, economic multilateral organizations soon marginalized those inclusive views and focused exclusively on economic growth. This paper discusses those early policy options and why they were marginalized. It argues that this happened for ideological reasons, specifically because of the ideological anti-New Deal post-war backlash and the adhesion of Western countries and multilateral organizations to what Charles Maier defined as the ‘politics of productivity.’ This ideological backlash explains the rise and early demise of Keynesian ideas in international organizations and, on the contrary, their stronger influence in developing countries where the direct influence of the US and Bretton Woods organizations was somehow mitigated.