Let’s be friends not foes: an assessment of the strategic co-evolution of the World Bank and the AIIB in the face of institutional overlap

Giuseppe Zaccaria

Chapter 14 in The Elgar Companion to the World Bank, 2024, pp 166-177 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The World Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) were widely seen as potential rivals in the global lending regime. The threat of institutional overlap and competition was expected to cast a shadow on the direction that their relationship would take. Today, however, the two institutions appear as partners, often complementing one another not only on specific technical aspects of projects but also effectively co-evolving cooperatively. This chapter investigates the factors that led to this puzzling outcome through an analysis of the World Bank and AIIB’s strategic reaction to the threat of institutional overlap. As the chapter shows, the two institutions recognized the advantages offered by cooperative relations and institutional isomorphism to cope with the potential negative effects of institutional overlap. This has allowed the World Bank to upkeep its status as the premier lending institution while the AIIB has benefited from the Bank’s well-established project pipeline and expertise.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Law - Academic; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781802204780.00026 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21163_14

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().