Large Scale Credit: Development and Poverty, the Two Sides of the Structural Adjustment Coin. Some Lessons from Romania

This paper explores what the World Bank (WB) understands by poverty, and the role credit instruments play in its strategy for economic growth and poverty reduction.  In doing so, this paper examines the use of credit in WB’s relationship with Romania between  1992 and  2014. Secondly, this paper aims at analyzing the role the WB has been atributing to the State over these 25 years. This perusal of its policies during this period offered insights to not only the tight but ambiguous relations between poverty and development in WB’s understanding of partnerships with emerging countries, such as Romania, but also the contradictory roles it assigns to the State, and its role in balancing the needs of the population against those of the market. This work comes shortly after the last WB- Romania agreement (2014) which resembles the "structural adjustment" ones, whose negative effects on the national economy are well known by now, and questions the rationality behind the belief that more loans would lead to economic stability and a fair distribution of economic growth.