THE WORLD BANK SINCE BRETTON WOODS.

By Robert E. Asher '31 andEdward S. Mason. Washington: The BrookingsInstitution, 1973. With selected bibliographyand other extensive appendices.915 pp. $17.50.

The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, better known as "the World Bank," was born in Bretton Woods, N.H., in 1944. Its birth was not nearly so controversial as that of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund - probably because it was not expected to amount to much. It was to be a supplement for and stimulus to international private investment. A cynic listening in at Bretton Woods might even have got the impression that "development" was added to give the Bank something to do after it finished the really im- portant work of recovery from World War II.

The Bank proceeded to surprise everyone, in- cluding itself, by occupying the center of the development finance stage. By its thirtieth birth- day the World Bank will have disbursed over $20 billion in loans to finance electric power projects,' transportation systems, agricultural development, education, water supply projects, and industrial development.

In The World Bank Since Bretton Woods Robert Asher of the Brookings Institution and Edward Mason of Harvard University trace the history of the Bank, analyze the economic operations of the Bank, and offer an appraisal of the Bank as a development institution. In this undertaking they have had the cooperation of the World Bank, including access to Bank files and personnel. The result is a book likely to be regarded as a definitive history for many years.

The book is well written and should interest both the specialist and the layman. Those in- terested in political aspects of Bank activities are likely to be disappointed, but this is an un- derstandable weakness in a book by two economists. Overall the book is an impressive achievement that furnishes convincing evidence to support the authors' conclusion that "the World Bank Group is better equipped than any agency we know of, national or international, to wear, at the economic and financial level, the primus-interpores mantle."

Mr. Baldwin, Dartmouth Associate Professor ofGovernment, is a specialist in internationalrelations.