Journal article
Earmarking for global health: benefits and perils of the World Bank’s trust fund model
- Abstract:
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Over the past 50 years, the World Bank has increasingly relied on resources contributed voluntarily from donors and held separately from its core budget to support projects and activities, particularly for global health. These resources are known as trust funds. In the case of the bank, these trust funds are synonymous with earmarked, extra-budgetary, and “multi-bi” aid (bilateral aid channelled through multilateral institutions). The absolute number and relative proportion of bank assets held in trust has skyrocketed since the early 1990s. In 2011, the bank was trustee to roughly half of the trust funds for official development assistance (ODA) worldwide, and in 2012-13 about 200 donors contributed $3.7bn to more than 1000 World Bank Group trust funds.
Trust fund governance at the bank
The World Bank Group channels voluntary grants from donors in three major ways: through IBRD (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and IDA (International Development Association) trust funds, financial intermediary funds, and IFC (International Finance Corporation) trust funds. In this article we focus primarily on the World Bank’s IBRD and IDA trust funds and financial intermediary funds (table 1⇓, see the first paper of this series for more on the World Bank Group’s structure).7 At IBRD/IDA, trust funds are classified as bank or recipient executed, depending on the bank’s management role. Bank executed trust funds are implemented directly by the bank.8 9 They typically fund technical support for IBRD/IDA country projects, provide seed funding for pilot projects, or contribute to the bank’s knowledge agenda. For recipient executed trust …
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, 474.1KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1136/bmj.j3394
Authors
- Publisher:
- BMJ
- Journal:
- BMJ More from this journal
- Volume:
- 2017
- Issue:
- 358
- Article number:
- j3394
- Publication date:
- 2017-08-31
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1756-1833
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1231855
- Local pid:
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pubs:1231855
- Deposit date:
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2022-01-12
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Winters and Sridhar.
- Copyright date:
- 2017
- Rights statement:
- ©2017 The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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