At many points in this paper, the World Bank’s role and its policies are discussed in contrast with the alternative of socialist development through to the late 1980s. Reference is made to socialist and other alternatives too, in discussing what some writers see as the wide scale failure of the World Bank to promote a better standard of living for all of the world’s peoples. In many respects, what the World Bank now pursues is not very different from the American policies promoted in the 1950s and 1960s, because development remains tied up in different political and Western economic goals. This research tends to conclude that not only have the recipient countries’ problems been unsolved, but some World Bank initiatives actually stood to perpetuate these countries’ economic problems and to aggravate the more human impacts of poverty.