Official Use Only




THE WORLD BANK GROUP ARCHIVES


    ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM




     Transcript of interview with


       GREGORY INGRAM




    July 7 and November 20, 2006
          Washington, D.C.

         By: Charles Ziegler
                                           S es s i o n 1
                                        July 7, 2006
                                     W a s h i n g to n , D.C.

[Begin Tape 1, Side A]

ZIEGLER: Today is July 7, 2006. My name is Charles Ziegler, a consultant with the World
Bank Group Oral History Program. I have with me here in the World Bank Group Archives Mr.
Gregory K. Ingram, with whom I’ll be conducting an oral history interview.

Well, Greg, I’m very glad you were able to come here today, especially given the fact you live
out of town, but it is very much appreciated that you can join us and participate in the World
Bank Group’s Oral History Program. To put things in some context, a little bit about your early
life and career. And to start, when and where were you born?

INGRAM: I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1944. I grew up north of Pittsburgh about
20 to 25 miles, in what were then the “exurbs” of Pittsburgh. We actually lived on a farm, which
we moved to when I was 11 years old. So I spent my teenage years doing farm chores, and we
had a small herd of Hereford cattle. My father was a civil engineer. He worked in Pittsburgh.
So the farm was a hobby for him, but it kept us all quite busy.

ZIEGLER: You may or may not know, for the last 20 years or so, the Bank has rented a record
storage facility north of Pittsburgh in Butler.

INGRAM: Butler is the county seat of Butler County. I lived just on the northern edge of
Allegheny County, just south of Butler County.

ZIEGLER: Can you relate something of your early life and education; I mean, mainly,
university and that sort of thing, maybe some formative jobs that you had as a youngster?

INGRAM: I went to public schools, public elementary school, and a local public high school. I
then attended Swarthmore College, where I received a Bachelor of Science degree in civil
engineering. And after that I went to Oxford University and did a B.A. in philosophy, politics
and economics—PPE, so called. And then I came back from Oxford and went to Harvard, where
I did a Ph.D. in economics. And I basically finished my degree in September of ‘71, at which
point I started teaching.

I was an assistant professor in the Economics Department at Harvard from ‘71 to ‘74. In ‘74, I
became an associate professor there. I worked in urban economics and my thesis adviser was
John Kain, who was an early analyst in the field. He was an early analyst in urban economics,
and he had worked in urban transportation with John Meyer. They had done a very important
book in 1965 called The Urban Transportation Problem. Given my interest in economics and
my background in civil engineering, I actually did transport economics as a special field as a
graduate student.


                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 2



I was hired as a research assistant in my second year, when I was a graduate student, by David
Kendrick, who was writing a book about computer models and asked me to read and summarize
material on urban modeling. I wrote a paper for him that was a review of the literature on urban
models. Then I talked to John Kain about that, and presented that paper to his seminar in urban
economics, and ended up doing a dissertation, under his leadership, in urban economics, working
on a computer-based model of urban housing markets.

In 1969, after I had done my course work at Harvard, I moved to New York and worked as a
research analyst at the National Bureau of Economic Research, which at that time was at 261
Madison Avenue in Manhattan. It had been in New York historically because it had been led by
people from Columbia University, Arthur Burns being the notable president of the Bureau in its
early years. John Meyer had become president in 1968, and was president for 10 years. In any
case, I worked at the Bureau for two years, did this modeling work, and then came back to
Harvard.

At Harvard, I taught urban economics for undergraduates, a transportation economics course for
graduate students, an undergraduate microeconomics course, and a course in computer modeling.
I also did a lot of research on transportation and urban air pollution. Remember, in 1970 the
Clean Air Act was passed, requiring that automobile emissions would be reduced by 90 percent
by 1975/76.

In ‘73 I managed a cost-benefit study for the National Academy of Sciences—a cost-benefit
analysis of the 1970 Clean Air Act. And the outstanding lesson from that was that the benefits
probably exceeded the costs, but the range of uncertainty was huge. I mean, benefits were $7
billion, plus or minus $3 billion, and costs were about $2 billion less. So it was an interesting
exercise. I continued to work in that area and then, about ’75, I started moving back to work on
housing and urban markets.

So, essentially, I was an academic before I joined the Bank. And I was active, did a lot of
external research, went out and got grants. I basically was a little profit center for Harvard
University because the research grants paid most of my salary and paid overhead to the
university, so they made money on me.

ZIEGLER: How did you become a World Bank staff member?

INGRAM: I got a phone call one day from a person I had worked with at the National Bureau
of Economic Research, an economist named Raymond Struyk. His last name is spelled S-T-R-
U-Y-K. Ray was then working at the Urban Institute, and he had been approached by Doug
[Douglas H.] Keare about taking a job at the Bank. And after a lot of negotiation, Ray decided
he really couldn’t do it. And he was then asked to help find an alternative. So he called me up
one day and asked if I was interested in the Bank. And I said, “Not particularly, but I’m always
willing to talk.” So I came down to the Bank and met Doug Keare, and learned about what he




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                   3


had in mind. He was looking for somebody to manage a research project on urban development
in developing countries.

So I went back to Harvard and talked to some Harvard colleagues about the idea of coming to the
Bank. Of course, Hollis Chenery was at the Bank at the time, whom everybody in the Harvard
Economics Department knew, since he had taught there. The view was that if I was working
anywhere around Hollis and working with Doug Keare, it would be sensible, but they warned me
that the Bank was a risky place. But under those conditions, it would make sense.

So I came down to the Bank, with a two-year leave of absence from Harvard, to run a research
project on urban development. This became the project known as the “City Study.” And we
looked at Bogota, Colombia, and Cali, Colombia, in great detail.

ZIEGLER: Well, you began your career in the Bank in 1977 doing urban research, as you said.
Besides that “City Study,” what were some of the significant areas of research that you
undertook? That, clearly, was the first one and an important one.

INGRAM: It was, and it went on for four years. Let me talk for a minute about that to give you
some perspective on it. In 1962, Ray Vernon and Edgar Hoover published a book called
Anatomy of a Metropolis, which was an analysis of New York City. They came up with a
number of hypotheses about urban development. And over the next decade or so, the kinds of
techniques and empirical approaches they had used were then extended to other U.S. cities. At
first, the view was that their findings were only relevant to New York. And as people looked at
more American cities, it turns out their findings were common across most American cities that
were examined. And there had been some work in Europe, and with similar results in European
cities. The findings were that manufacturing employment decentralizes over time, followed by
residences; that trip patterns change in ways that make it more difficult to handle travel with
transit, cities become more auto oriented. You end up with employment in the central business
district; that requires face-to-face contact, which is, essentially, people in the finance sector, legal
profession, and advertising. And the one manufacturing activity that remains in the center city,
by the way, is printing. Everything else moves out.

Those kinds of results and empirical regularities were found across all the cities that had been
looked at. But everybody “knew,” of course, that cities in developing countries were different.
Everybody “knew” that in cities in developing countries the rich people lived downtown and the
poor people lived in the suburbs, unlike in the United States. So we went off to do our work in
Colombia. And, in fact, what we found were patterns that were very similar to the patterns in the
United States. It is not quite the case that the rich people live downtown and the poor people live
in the suburbs. In Bogotá and Cali the rich people live in a particular sector of the city and the
poor people live everywhere because there is a predominance of poor people in these cities. But
we also looked at transport patterns, local public finance, the location of employment, labor
markets, and housing markets. We did that in both Bogota and Cali, and we then came up with a
set of empirical results, which we published in the early ‘80s.




                                            Gregory Ingram
                               July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                  4


There has been modest empirical work on such a scale subsequently carried out by the Bank or
anybody else. To the extent that there has been additional empirical work, it has tended to
confirm the findings that there’s really tremendous regularity in urban development patterns.
And later on we can talk about an article I wrote, which reviews what have we learned from
urban development patterns, when I retrospectively, in the ‘90s, looked back at these patterns.

ZIEGLER: That was the working paper you did, yes.

INGRAM: That’s right. It was also published in Urban Studies. So, basically, the thrust of that
empirical research was essentially to learn how similar or different cities in developing countries
were relative to cities in industrial countries. And we found tremendous similarities. This is not
necessarily great news because you can’t look at cities in the United States and say that the urban
profession has done a wonderful job managing U.S. cities. So one can take a certain amount of
cold comfort from the fact that there are underlying commonalities in behavior and development
patterns and, for that matter, actual underlying similarities in parameter values, in modal choice
equations and other relationships. It’s really quite remarkable. And in that working paper I
speculate about why the similarities exist. These similarities are actually rather remarkable, so
the question is why is that? What are the underlying mechanisms? And I speculate about what
those might be.

ZIEGLER: Did you have to travel a lot down to Colombia?

INGRAM: Yes.

ZIEGLER: Did you do a lot of field research?

INGRAM: Yes, indeed. I spent two summers living in Colombia, and I would travel down
there regularly. We had a partner institution in Bogota. We had a research team in Colombia.

The other thing we found, by the way, which is quite interesting and still true, is that there’s a
tremendous amount of data in these cities, but there’s not much analysis. And so I have often
said that the tragedy in urban research is that the ratio of analysis to data is too low. And too
often when we want to learn something about a city, the first thing we do is to make the
denominator larger; that is, we collect more data rather than do more analysis.

ZIEGLER: Of the existing data.

INGRAM: Of the existing data. And, frankly, we found just tremendous amounts of existing
data that hadn’t been analyzed, and we learned a great deal. We did, of course, also make the
denominator larger. We collected household survey data, but all of the data we had for firms and
enterprises were from other existing data sources. We got access to blinded Social Security
records so we could see how workers were relocating. We locationally coded a lot of this data
and were able to look at locational patterns and how they changed over time. It’s still the case
that the ratio of analysis to data is too low. So that’s a watchword.



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 5



ZIEGLER: In your experience, what had been the objectives of the Bank’s urban lending, and
how have they been operationalized over time?

INGRAM: I think when I arrived at the Bank, there was a lot of emphasis on urban
infrastructure and on housing for the poor, which took the form, in the early years, of sites and
service projects; that is, where you go in and install minimal services: water, sanitation,
electricity, and sometimes build a housing utility core, almost like a big telephone booth with the
utility services, and then the households come in and build a unit around the utility core with the
services.

Bank lending in urban areas evolved over time. There was a move to much more involvement in
housing finance. That was convenient for the institution because you could move large amounts
of foreign exchange into a country, and into a sector that didn’t use a lot of foreign exchange.
Subsequently there was then more attention to looking at the city as a whole, the—thinking of
the city as a whole entity, much the way we now look at a country. So in parallel to country
strategies—and actually preceding them—it became fashionable to design and draw up city
strategies.

The urban sector has had an ongoing challenge, though, and that is that urban activities can be
conceptualized as a sector, or they can be thought of as merely occurring at an urban location.
Now, lots of things happen in cities. People who worry about health have health clinics in cities.
People who worry about education have schools in cities, and so on and so forth. So lots of other
sectors are involved in urban areas.

But the particular insight that urban economics brings is the importance of location and
locational analysis. And that’s gotten obscured in the Bank, because in recent years, it became
fashionable to divide the world into sectors and themes. For example, gender is a theme and
agriculture is a sector. And in the sector versus theme dichotomy, urban became a theme not a
sector, much to the dismay of many urban analysts. Of course, this was an outcome that all the
other sectors thought was fine because they didn’t really have an interest in envisioning urban as
a sector. So there’s been an evolution in the thinking about cities and urban areas in the Bank.
And, currently, I believe it’s still the case that urban continues to be a theme. People think of
cities as locations, but they don’t really pay enough attention to the economics of location, which
is what urban economics particularly contributes to economics, generally.

ZIEGLER: In your view, what’s been the performance of the World Bank’s urban projects and
were initial lessons from earlier urban projects successfully incorporated into later ones? My
recollection was that in the early ‘70s—around 1972—the Bank came on in terms of urban
projects, specifically. This is about five years before you actually came to the Bank. So I’m sure
there must have been early, well, successes and failures, and how did the Bank learn from these,
if at all, how did they learn from the . . . ?




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                  6


INGRAM: A couple of comments. If you look at the OED [Operations Evaluation Department]
numbers on urban projects, earlier urban projects did quite well, and urban continued to perform
well as a sector. There was one year, something like 1998, where the completed projects were
just terrible. And because performance measures take averages over five years, it looked for a
period of time as if urban projects had deteriorated in performance quite a bit. But when you
look at it carefully, there was one bad year, which one could loosely relate to the 1987
reorganization of the Bank.

ZIEGLER: Yes, I’ve read that. Yes.

INGRAM: And there was a kind of an echo effect or a performance dearth, let’s call it, from
the reorganization that then was harvested about eight to ten years later when the projects closed.

ZIEGLER: One wonders whether it could be seen in other sectors, also, or themes.

INGRAM: I think, to some extent, it can be. I think there’s some evidence of it. But, basically,
there has been some serious and careful analysis of urban projects. The lessons and evidence of
learning is that repeater projects—doing the second and third urban project in the same city—
produce projects of successively improved performance. There also appears to be a country
learning effect as well as a city learning effect. So there is evidence that, at least at the city and
country level, staying with it and doing additional projects pays off, that essentially either the
Bank staff gets trained ,or the country bureaucrats have been trained . . .

ZIEGLER: I was going to ask. Both probably get trained.

INGRAM: People learn how the Bank works, but the projects do perform better. There was an
empirical piece done in, I would say, the early ‘90s that demonstrated this. It’s called something
like “Urban Projects: Learning from Experience,” that went through and documented all of these
relationships. So, yes, the urban portfolio has done reasonably well. I have to tell you I haven’t
looked at it in the last 18 months, but at the time I left the Bank, urban was still looking like it
was an above-average sector.

There are a lot of talented people, by the way, who were involved in urban projects in the early
years. It may not have seemed that way at the time, but a lot of senior managers at the Bank
started out in urban, people like Sven Sandstrom and Callisto [E.] Madavo, Johannes [F.] Linn,
and so on. A whole crop of senior managers came out of urban later. So urban did have some
raw talent in the ‘70s.

ZIEGLER: By June of 1981 there had been important changes in the organization of urban
work at the World Bank. Urban operations had been regionalized, and the Urban Projects
Department had been transformed into the Urban Development Department, a separate
department in the Operations Policy Staff. Can you shed some light on the thinking behind these
changes? Now, you talk a little bit about sectors and themes and all. It probably ties in there, I
would imagine.



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 7



INGRAM: Well, at that time, urban was still a sector. I mean, the business of thinking of urban
as a theme is a 21st century phenomenon. But I think people had the view that urban was on a
track which other sectors had been on before, or would be on subsequently. When you wanted to
initiate new activity in the Bank at that time, you set up something called a central operating
department. And the central operating department did projects centrally. And then, once you
learned how to do it and you built staff capacity, you then decentralized the staff to the Regions,
and you then had regional units who did projects. So the transition from a central operating
department to regionalized activities and a central policy department was essentially the coming
of age of the urban sector at that time. We saw something similar to that subsequently in
environment, where the Bank started out with a central environment unit, and then had
decentralized units, regional environmental departments called REDs, at the time, as I recall it.
So, no, this was just part and parcel of what people thought was a normal maturation process.

ZIEGLER: You retained an interest in urban development issues pretty much throughout your
career in the Bank, as evidenced by the November 1997 Policy Research Working Paper 1841,
entitled Patterns of Metropolitan Development: What Have We Learned?—and we just talked
about this a bit earlier on—which you had authored. In order to sum up the experience in the
urban sector, could you trace, on a broad level, the evolution of the World Bank’s lending
strategies and the choice of project instruments in the urban sector, as you saw them; just kind of
a broad-brush summary.

INGRAM: I mentioned earlier that when I came to the Bank, engagement on the urban side was
in sites and service projects. The goal at that time was a replicable project. The idea was to do a
demonstration project, to show that something will work, so that the country will begin to
replicate the project on its own. And sites and services projects embodied this notion of
replicable projects. We learned subsequently from work Steve [Stephen K.] Mayo did that the
sites and service projects that the Bank had been funding were actually relatively heavily
subsidized, and therefore they weren’t really replicated by governments after the Bank no longer
financed them. I think now we have a clearer understanding about this. Although people
thought at the time they were self-financing, careful analysis ex post showed that that was not the
case.

There was also work, at that time, on local public finance reform. The seeds for the Bank’s later
interest in decentralization were sown at that time. Next, the urban sector became much more
interested and focused on urban management issues. There was a conjecture, possibly not even a
conscious conjecture, but a conjecture that somehow a city was like a big company, or like a
firm, and you had to manage the city. So in that model, the mayor is the CEO. That view held
sway for a while, and there have been a number of urban management initiatives in the
institution.

There was, also—again I mentioned earlier—a move to housing finance. And the Bank then was
engaged in some large-scale housing finance lending, which involved much more lending to the




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                  8


central government. And then we moved into the phase of looking at the city as an entity unto
itself with urban assistance strategies, somewhat like the country assistance strategy.

My own view about this is that, in economics, you should not think of a city as a firm; that is,
you should not use the theory of the firm to think about urban problems. What you should do is
envision a city as a small, open economy. So you should be drawn more to trade theory.

Now, the implications of those two different ways of thinking about cities are very different. If
you’re into the theory of the firm and envision cities competing with each other, you’re
intellectually almost inherently into a zero sum game; if my city wins, your city loses, and we’re
competing against each other. When you think about the city as a small, open economy and you
apply the theory of trade, the attractive thing about that intellectually is there are gains from
trade. Trade is not a zero sum game. And I’ve always argued that cities are much more like
small countries than they are like big firms, and that the mayor is not the CEO; the mayor is the
prime minister. And the mayor’s job is to build political coalitions and make things happen.
The mayor lives in a world where it’s very difficult to define a clear bottom line; there’s no profit
and loss statement. And so if you think about cities as small countries, and you bring the
relevant tools that economics has to bear on urban analysis—and now I’m talking about urban
analysis in the aggregate—I’m abstracting for a minute from the sort of locational economics I
was talking about earlier—you’d be much better served. And the Bank has not come down as
clearly as it might on treating cities as small countries. There has been, for example, a lot of
discussion of the city as a competitive entity, there’s the competitive city, the financeable city,
the livable city and so on, and this I don’t think has gotten us—or the urban analyst—very far.

You find these terms, such as the competitive city, by the way, embodied in recent urban strategy
papers. But the fact is, if you think about cities as analogues to small countries, it’s difficult to
come up with a simple normative framework. It’s difficult to write down the objective function
for a country. You can write down the objective function for General Motors, or for a typical
firm. And so if you think about the simple analytics of economics, where you write down an
objective function and you maximize it subject to constraints, that doesn’t work very well for
cities. And I had advocated that what we should be doing in cities is collecting data on a number
of different aspects of cities. Since we didn’t have an underlying normative model, at least it
would be very useful to know where a city stood in terms of the distribution of all cities; for
example, whether the city is in the 5th percentile of population density or the 80th percentile of
population density. There was some work done along those lines by Steve Mayo and Solly
[Shlomo] Angel with Habitat [Habitat for Humanity], but that was an effort that was eventually
stillborn in the Bank. And the urban folks have not really advanced that field very much.

The final comment is in terms of issues to be addressed. If you want to think about managing
cities, it turns out that a number of cities in developing countries have been rated by international
bond-rating agencies because they have actually gone out and sold bonds on the global market at
the city level. And my sense was—my advice was always: “If you want to think about how to
measure how well cities are managed, go talk to these bond-rating agencies and ask them what
are the dimensions they look at. If they think a city has a high bond rating, what is the analysis



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 9


that underlies that, and let’s use that kind of analysis to make determinations about whether cities
are well managed or not.” So this is an evolving area, and there are lots of additional things yet
to do.

ZIEGLER: Putting on your OED hat for a moment, what, in your view, were the primary
lessons learned by the World Bank in the urban sector? And would you say that the Bank’s
efforts in the sector have been largely successful? For the second half of that question, you have
indicated earlier on that the success rate, according to an OED . .

INGRAM: It’s pretty high.

ZIEGLER: . . analysis, it’s been pretty good, yes.

INGRAM: Well, again, the projects have been successful in terms of their own objectives,
which is the way OED measures success. I mentioned earlier that replicability, which was an
objective of the sites and service projects and many of the earlier Bank projects, was not really
attained. It’s hard to look out in the world and find examples where countries have taken
initiatives that the Bank has started and run with them. This, by the way, is an issue which has
reappeared currently. There’s different vocabulary used now; instead of “replicability,” the
terminology has changed lately to be called “scaling up.” And Jim [James D.] Wolfensohn has
actually financed a center at Brookings Institution, headed by Johannes Linn, whose objective is
to figure out how to scale up projects.

ZIEGLER: You mean personally financed, or through . . . ?

INGRAM: It’s essentially personally financed. Yes, Mr. Wolfensohn has committed $10
million of funds from the Wolfensohn Foundation to Brookings over the next five years to
underwrite research and analysis on how to scale up projects, which is essentially replicability
dressed in slightly different clothing.

I also mentioned earlier that the repeater projects have worked well and have worked better. So
there has been some success. At the same time, given the comments I just made, this is a sector
that’s still evolving. And it’s not just evolving in the Bank. The urban analysts at the Bank are
not in a stream separated from the river and the rest of the world. It continues to be the case that
people generally do not have very clearly defined models or ideas about how to analyze cities.
And so you get a lot of muddy thinking about urban development. And this is contributed to by
a lot of other professions besides economics, I might say. This is an area that everybody is
engaged in, everybody in the social sciences.

ZIEGLER: Cities, in a sense, continue to evolve, too. Isn’t it the case, if I’m not mistaken, that
it’s either just happened recently, or will happen soon, the majority of human beings will be
living in cities rather than . . . ?




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                10


INGRAM: In urban areas. That actually is likely to happen in 2006. It’s likely to happen this
year that 50 percent of the world’s population will be urbanized. Yes, this is actually—it could
be happening even as we speak—quite a remarkable outcome.

ZIEGLER: And it took only, what, 5,000 years or so to do that from the first cities.

INGRAM: Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s quite remarkable.

ZIEGLER: Winding up with the urban issue, are there any particular aspects of your work in
the Bank’s urban sector that we haven’t covered that you’d like to say anything about?

INGRAM: The one comment I would make is, starting in the mid-‘80s or so, there was a
decline in the Bank’s role as an intellectual leader in urban. There had been units in the
Research Department [Economics and Research Staff] dedicated to urban issues, and they began
to disappear in the mid-‘80s, and the Bank’s intellectual leadership in urban—which I think was
fairly significant up until that point—began to erode. Now in fact, from about the mid-‘80s to
about the mid-‘90s, it’s also the case that urban economics in the rest of the world went to sleep.
But when it woke up elsewhere in the mid-‘90s, the Bank continued to sleep, and a lot of
interesting work has been done in the last ten years in urban, which the Bank has not particularly
engaged in.

ZIEGLER: To what would you attribute this somnolence?

INGRAM: Well, we’ll talk about that in a bit, but there’s been a general decline in sector
research in the Bank starting in the early ‘90s. This is a decision essentially made by the top
management of the Bank. They made a decision to reduce the funding for research, and they
carried it out. And this all happened, ironically, at the same time the Bank was being touted as a
knowledge institution, as a knowledge bank. You have to note here, and later we’ll talk about
the fact that in nominal terms, not even adjusted for inflation, in the ‘90s research expenditures
of the Bank went down by 30 percent, which means in real terms they went down by 40 to 45
percent. It’s a remarkable event.

ZIEGLER: On August 1, 1983, you became director, Development Research Department.
How did that promotion come about? What were the circumstances that led to that promotion?

INGRAM: Anne [O.] Krueger had come to the Bank as chief economist the year before, and
she had come to the conclusion that she wanted to make some changes, and she proceeded to
make changes on the research side.

ZIEGLER: Which were controversial, as I seem to recall.

INGRAM: They were controversial. They were probably more controversial stylistically than
intellectually, although there was controversy intellectually as well. Because what she was doing
was moving the research establishment of the Bank away from a structuralist view of



                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                11


development, which Hollis Chenery had embodied. The structuralist model being, as economies
grow you move resources out of agriculture into industry and services. Hollis had published a
lot of work documenting how that process occurred. There was also a fair amount of research
that involved large-scale programming models reflecting large-scale planning approaches, and
she did not think that made a great deal of sense. Her forte was in trade. The Bank had not been
doing much in trade. She was intent on moving the Bank away from the structuralist approach
into a more market-oriented and trade-oriented approach. So she established an international
trade division in the Research Department. And she was then looking for a new director for the
department. And one day I got a phone call from her asking if I would come and talk to her.

In retrospect, she had been talking to members of the Research Committee about candidates, and
I think that Tony [Anthony A.] Churchill, who became director of the Urban Development
Department [Water Supply and Urban Development Department] and was a member of the
Research Committee, had suggested that she might talk to me. And so I went over to see her, she
offered me the job, and I accepted it. It was a fairly rapid transaction. But anyway, that’s how
that happened.

ZIEGLER: So you signed onto the Bank for a longer haul than the initial two years that you
started with.

INGRAM: That actually had happened earlier. To give you an idea of how the Bank has
changed, I came to the Bank with a two-year term appointment. At the end of that period, I
signed up for another two-year term appointment. And at that point, I resigned from Harvard
University because you can’t have more than two years of leave.

Then I realized I really needed to buy a house. And if I was going to buy a house, I thought I
would need to go to a bank to get a mortgage, and would need something more than a two-year
appointment. So I went in to see my department chairman, who was Ben [Benjamin B.] King,
and I said, “Ben, I need a regular appointment because I need to buy a house and get a
mortgage.” And he said okay. And that was the end of it. And then I got a regular appointment.
I mean, things are a bit more complicated now, when you want to move from . . .

ZIEGLER: Ben King had a sort of breezy informality in some respects, too.

INGRAM: Yes, but he also delivered.

ZIEGLER: Yes.

INGRAM: He was a remarkable man.

In any case, I then got my regular appointment. But I have to say, though, that I never, at that
time, and throughout my whole Bank career, planned on staying at the Bank for what turned out
to be 26 years. I was always in a situation where there were another two or three interesting




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 12


years. There was always something interesting to do, but I never envisioned myself being a
“lifer” at the Bank, which is what I became.

ZIEGLER: I’m going to just change the tape here.

[End Tape 1, Side A]
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]

ZIEGLER: Before I had to change the tape I was going to ask you: What was the mandate of
the Development Research Department when you came aboard as director?

INGRAM: I think what we largely did in the Development Research Department was empirical
work using data from developing countries, testing the transferability of insights that had been
developed elsewhere. Let me give you an example. There was a literature developed in the
human capital area about the rate of return to education. So people like George Psacharopoulos
then spent a fair amount of time in the Bank taking data from developing countries and saying,
“Well, we have this approach that people have used in the United States. Let’s see how it works
in developing countries.” And he then systematically estimated the rate of return to education in
developing countries. There also were similar kinds of work that were done on behavior in labor
markets and industrial organization.

The other activities that were going on that were not related to this but more macro included
work done on the development of computable general equilibrium models applied to developing
countries and, related to that, social accounting matrices. These represent an aggregate view of
the economy.

And I already mentioned that Anne Krueger had set up a new division to look at international
trade [International Economic Research Division], and she brought [Joseph] Michael Finger in to
head that. Later, we set up a Macroeconomics Division. Mohsin [S.] Khan from the IMF
[International Monetary Fund] came over to head that division. So there was a transformation of
the divisions, which illustrates, by the way, typical behavior in the Bank. That is, if you want
something to happen in the Bank, you set up a unit, and you charge the head of that unit to make
whatever it is you want to have happen, happen. Otherwise you tend to get lip service in the
institution. So that when you’re serious about working on the environment, you stop having an
environmental adviser in the central department, and you set up environmental divisions. In fact,
that’s still very much true in the Bank. The Bank is driven by its organizational structure, and
that was also true in research. So the way you get work on trade done is you set up a trade
division, and you tell the head of the trade division that his job is to do research on trade, and
then that happens. Otherwise, if you have somebody doing work on industrial organization, and
you tell them to do work on trade, it may or may not happen.

So the rule that “organization is destiny” at the Bank is also true in research.

ZIEGLER: Rather than character.



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                13



INGRAM: That’s right, it’s just as true in research as it is anywhere else. But anyway, that
gives you an idea of what we were up to in the Development Research Department.

ZIEGLER: The year before you were appointed director, Development Research Department,
the research complex in the Bank underwent reorganization. What was your role in that
reorganization?

INGRAM: I really had no role in that reorganization. I was off being the economic adviser to
Urban Projects. I was not a member of the Research Committee, I was not particularly affected
by Anne Krueger’s arrival as chief economist, and I played virtually no role. I had a lot of
friends in the Research Department because I had been there for four years, and I talked to them
from time to time. But, no, I was not particularly involved in that reorganization, although I
soon became involved as director, I must say. I did step onto a moving train.

ZIEGLER: In your position as director of the Development Research Department you reported,
as we noted, to Anne Krueger, who was also the first woman appointed as a vice president in the
World Bank. How would you characterize your professional relationship with her, and what was
your view of the direction she was taking Bank research?

INGRAM: Intellectually her approach was really welcome. You have to recall that the Bank
was not doing very much in trade. We’re talking about 1982, 1983, where the four little tigers of
East Asia were beginning to be prominent. South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan
were all in the exporting business, not in the import substitution business. Hollis’s view of
structural adjustment was to rely heavily on import substitution. He didn’t really pay much
attention to trade. His models were largely closed models. And Anne came in with a trade
perspective which we now look back on and say, “Yes, that’s a perfectly valid model, and lots of
countries have done very well by it,” China being a current notable example. And other
countries are not doing so well; India being reasonably successful but not particularly export
driven, by the way, and Latin America being challenged with that approach.

So Anne was, in fact, bringing the Bank into modernity. She also was bringing in a view that
was a reaction to development economics of the ‘50s and ‘60s, when people were concerned
about market failure and became advocates of government intervention. And the Bank, by the
way, was a strong advocate of government intervention—just look at the power sector, where the
Bank led the nationalization of power systems in many countries. And the experience with
government intervention led to the concept of government failure, right? And Anne came in
with the view that government intervention was not the solution and could often be the problem,
and that the Bank needed to understand that it needed to depend on markets to a much greater
extent.

ZIEGLER: I think many people felt she was an echo of the [Ronald] Reagan administration, to
that extent anyway.




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                   14


INGRAM: Yes, indeed. And that was true at the time. But again, if you look back at it from
where we are now, it was a direction in which the Bank had to move.

And the government failure point—we can talk about it a little later when we talk about
infrastructure—but it’s very well documented. The Bank was advocating significant government
intervention in these economies and advocating, as I said, in particular the nationalization of
power systems, in which it then has more recently tried to promote private investment. So it’s
had second thoughts, and we’ve all learned from this experience. But Anne very much was an
advocate of the market, and so she was moving the Bank in directions in which it had to go.

People also had the view, if you can contrast Hollis with Anne, that Hollis was very devoted to
particular views of the world. He tolerated a lot of different views in the Research Department.
While in some sense he didn’t let a thousand flowers bloom, he did let several dozen flowers
bloom. People would come and do research in areas that Hollis didn’t necessarily advocate,
including urban development. Anne probably was a bit less welcoming, a bit less ecumenical
than Hollis had been, but the Bank needed to move in different directions, and she was an agent
who made that happen. People were surprised at the time, but in retrospect, these were changes
that were overdue.

ZIEGLER: And you were generally supportive of them, I gather.

INGRAM: Yes. If you ask me what sort of economist am I, the answer is that I’m an applied
microeconomist. And so the idea that people respond to incentives and that prices matter and
markets matter is something I feel very strongly about. That’s not to say that there aren’t market
failures and there’s certainly a need for regulation, but there also are clear issues with
government competence as well. And so one needs to wend a bit of a middle way, which is the
path that the Bank is seeking to find now.

ZIEGLER: Certainly some of the privatization that the Bank has advocated has met with, shall
we say, resistance. I think of the Bolivian Cochabamba water supply.

INGRAM: Yes, yes, yes. Well, that’s a case where the Bank has been pilloried a bit unfairly,
actually, in the case of Cochabamba.

It’s also the case, by the way, that within infrastructure the water sector is the most difficult
sector. Most people don’t have the view, for example, that telephone service is a basic need.
And most people have the view that if you use the telephone, it’s perfectly sensible to expect you
to pay to use the telephone. So there’s not any ideological resistance to the idea that you should
pay for phone service.

With respect to water supply, it turns out people have the view—a correct view, of course—that
water is a basic need. But then there’s an inference that because it’s a basic need, it’s immoral to
charge for water. Although it’s perfectly true that water is a basic need, and it’s perfectly true
that it falls out of the sky on us, it is also the case that there is a handling and purification charge.



                                            Gregory Ingram
                               July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 15


If you want to turn on a spigot in your house and have clean water run out, be prepared to pay
something for the delivery. And the water sector continues to be the infrastructure sector with
the poorest cost recovery record. In developing countries about a third of the costs of water
supply are, in fact, paid by consumers. Consumers pay about half to 60 percent of electricity
costs, and essentially telecommunications pays its own way. Within telecommunications, the
long distance service subsidizes the local service, although that is changing with changes in
technology as well. But, essentially, you can order the sectors in terms of their cost recovery
performance, and water is always at the bottom.

ZIEGLER: In 1984, the research priorities of the World Bank, in part, I believe as a result of
the Report on Suggested Research Activities at the World Bank by Professor Assar Lindbeck of
the University of Stockholm [which forms Part II of Report No. 5325, Report on the World Bank
Research Program, November 1984] shifted from an emphasis on highly formalized, large-scale
quantitative forecasting or planning models and related optimizing models to more social
science-oriented analyses, emphasizing studies in factual behavior, patterns of individual agents
and institutions. This shift in emphasis to more applied and policy-oriented research was to
underpin simple and robust policy advice rather than seeking for social optimization to make
research activities more relevant for the emerging operational activities of the Bank. How did
this shift affect you specifically as director of the Development Research Department, and did
you have any input into the decision to make this shift? I think we’ve been talking somewhat
about this, of course, in our previous conversation here.

INGRAM: Yes. The move was very much from developing tools to support central planning to
thinking more about how to use the market. In terms of tools to support central planning, there
was work being done in the Research Department on energy programming models to determine
where the next fertilizer plant should be located in India. Activities embodied large-scale,
nationwide logistics analysis of where to put the steel mill, where to put the large facilities. A
group of people in the Development Research Center, under Jack [John H.] Duloy, was doing
work like that in the mid-‘70s. That work had been diminishing, but basically that work did in
fact stop. Now, work on computable general equilibrium models did continue, but they were
more macroeconomic models.

I think, by the way, there still is use for some large models, not particularly to locate fertilizer
plants in India, but if you want to sensibly manage, say, a large river basin, you really need to
have a large model, or a large accounting machine that helps you keep track of people who take
water out, and people who put waste in and so on. And that kind of work continued in the Bank
and continues, for that matter, in universities. At Harvard University Professor Peter Rodgers
has worked with the Bank on and off, particularly on these large river basin models. That is an
issue that continues.

But as I said, this was an area where the notion of government failure was introduced, and the
Bank moved to the market. And I’ve already said that I do applied micro. I think incentives
matter and markets are useful mechanisms for transmitting incentives. And this will show up as




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                16


a theme of the World Development Report in 1994 that I worked on [World Development Report
1994: Infrastructure for Development]. So I welcomed this change.

ZIEGLER: In your view, did the simple and robust policy advice that I mentioned in the
previous question actually emerge?

INGRAM: Well, yes and no. There’s this famous “Washington Consensus” article by . . .

ZIEGLER: John Williamson.

INGRAM: Yes, by John Williamson. That, in some sense, constituted at the macro level the
simple and robust policy advice. I think where thinking is now, there’s a kind of modified
version of this, and the modified version is that you have to adapt the simple and robust advice to
country conditions. In other words, there has to be customization of the advice to country
circumstances. And this is embedded in the homily, “One size does not fit all.”

Now, that having been said, economists will continue to make statements suggesting that they
believe one size fits all. I mean, economists will tell you sales taxes are generally regressive.
There are many robust, empirical findings that empirical work has sustained. Now it’s quite a
step from saying that sales taxes are regressive to telling people how you should design the
national tax system in Nigeria. So one will draw, to some extent, on some simple and robust
facts or empirical findings, and then mix them together in ways that make sense in the country
context. If you have a hopelessly corrupt customs bureau, maybe you don’t want to use customs
excise duties to the extent that you would otherwise. So the notion is, yes, there are some simple
and robust findings out there, but the current thinking is to mix and match with country
conditions. And our friend Professor Williamson will be the first to tell you how much he
regrets writing the article about the “Washington Consensus.”

ZIEGLER: So I’ve read, yes. Well, the Fund is criticized frequently still, I gather, for cookie-
cutter policy recommendations, that sort of thing.

INGRAM: And I think with some merit. I think that they do have relatively simple and
routinized approaches that they use. That’s a debate that’s been going on, initiated most
vociferously by Joe [Joseph E.] Stiglitz, while he was chief economist of the World Bank.

ZIEGLER: World Bank research during the 1980s had been driven, in large part, by the
institutional mandate to reduce world poverty. In FY ‘84, the Research Policy Committee
recommended that research be encouraged in five areas to respond to the Bank’s rapidly growing
involvement in policy-based lending, with its emphasis on macroeconomic and trade
considerations. These areas were: costs and benefits of government intervention;
interrelationships between institutional structures and incentives; the international economic
environment; the relationship of short- to medium-term stabilization measures in long-term
economic development; and economic planning. Please reflect on how this new institutional




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 17


involvement in policy-based lending and the official encouragement of research in these new
areas affected the work of the Development Research Department.

INGRAM: With those particular mandates—and this grew out of Assar Lindbeck’s work—
what the chief economist of the Bank at that time, Anne Krueger, did was to set up a Research
Policy Council that paralleled the Research Committee. She took funds from the Research
Support Budget and funded five large comparative studies, each about a million-and-a-half
dollars, typically doing case studies across 12 to 16 countries. She set those in motion to address
these issues. She herself was heavily involved in one of these comparative studies that addressed
issues of agricultural pricing, for example. These studies went on, typically, for three to five
years, and they finished after she had left the Bank. But this all happened largely outside the
Development Research Department, and through a separate committee. This is the sort of
institutional response I was talking about earlier.

By the way, this use of comparative international projects is something Anne had done earlier in
her career. She had done some work for the National Bureau of Economic Research, particularly
on trade issues, with Professor [Jagdish N.] Bhagwati at Columbia. And these National Bureau
comparative studies were very well received. So she had this approach in mind. This involved
designing templates for each country case study, so that at the end of the day, you could look
across 12 or 14 or 16 country case studies, and you could make generalizations across them. So
that’s essentially the instrument that she used to respond to these objectives that she had in mind.

ZIEGLER: Did it actually work out that you could make those cross comparisons?

INGRAM: The studies had varied levels of success. The work she was involved in on
agricultural pricing with Maurice Schiff, who—I believe—is still a Bank staff member, was
probably one of the best studies because it was done in a reasonably timely way, and it said
sensible things. But a number of the other studies didn’t fare quite so well. They took longer.
They were less concise. A lot of the country studies were published separately. In a few cases,
the summary volumes were disappointing. But these projects were all evaluated, ironically, by
the Research Advisory Staff that I was heading at the time, so there’s a record of evaluation of
these things. I think, given the way they turned out, they weren’t all that successful. Taken
together, as I said, the one on agricultural pricing was probably the best of the lot, and some of
the others were a bit late, and they were telling us things that most people thought they already
knew which, of course, is always a problem in research.

ZIEGLER: In November 1986, during your time as director of the Development Research
Department, the Report on World Bank Research Program, Part 1, Report No. 6505, November
1986, noted, quote, “The Bank’s research program continues to be guided by four objectives: to
support all aspects of the Bank’s operations; to broaden understanding of the development
process; to improve the Bank’s capacity to provide advice to member countries; and to assist in
developing indigenous research capacity in member countries,” unquote. How did you and your
colleagues proceed in pursuit of those objectives?




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 18


INGRAM: First, let me say these objectives actually stemmed from the time when Hollis
Chenery was chief economist. These went back to the mid to late ‘70s. So these were
longstanding objectives of the research program. Let me make a couple comments about this.

First of all, institutionally, I already mentioned the Research Committee. There’s a Research
Department in the Bank, which has its own budget, but other departments often spent some of
their own budget on research, particularly in the ‘80s. And the Research Support Budget was a
separate fund that was allocated to projects on the basis of proposals submitted by Bank staff.
Think of it as a kind of an internal National Science Foundation.

Any staff member in the Bank can write a proposal to seek money from the Research Support
Budget. It has to be endorsed by their manager, but they can write a proposal. The proposal’s
evaluation process is a function of how much money it is asking for. If it is asking for a
significant amount of money, which when I was there was over $35,000, it would go through an
external peer-review process. Then the person who wrote the proposal would respond to the
external peer-review comments in writing. The package would then go to the Research
Committee, which included the proposal, the external reviews and the response. The Research
Committee would then make a determination about whether to fund the research or not.

Actually, the constitutional rules are that the chief economist makes the decision based on the
advice of the Research Committee. The composition of the Research Committee was essentially
senior members of the Bank who had an interest, capacity, and record in research. Virtually all
were from outside of the Research Department and largely outside the development economics
complex. So the Research Committee historically has been populated significantly by Regional
chief economists, for example, and by other people in sector departments who have research
standing. So its members are drawn from the research establishment in the Bank outside of
development economics. And that gives the rest of the Bank a real forum in which to transmit to
the chief economist information about what their priorities are.

This whole system of an internal Research Support Budget and a Research Committee advising
the chief economist was put in place by Hollis Chenery, and is actually masterful and
institutionally unique in that it is extremely rare in a large organization for any resources ever to
be allocated through a competitive process. Within organizations, it is normally command and
control. So that if you look at a typical large corporation that has a research organization, there’s
a vice president of research who sits on the management committee and gets a budget that is then
allocated by the VP. There’s no competitive system. The Bank is actually remarkably unique in
using competition to allocate these resources.

And the Research Committee turns out to be, in terms of the internal politics of it—not just the
internal rationality of it—a terrific idea because it comprises a group of relatively important
people in the Bank who are informed about the research programs. And because they are
involved in the decisionmaking process, when they’re in conversations with other people where
particular projects are being attacked, because they participated in the decision, you know,
they . . .



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 19



ZIEGLER: They buy into it.

INGRAM: They buy into it, and so they’re natural defenders of the research program. The
longevity of the research program in the Bank in some sense, I think, is largely due to this
Research Committee. But this goes back to the objectives of supporting aspects of the Bank
operations and improving the Bank’s capacity to provide advice to member countries. The
Research Committee is an instrument that really helps the chief economist see that these
objectives are met.

Another important fact: At the time when I was running the Research Department, and when I
left the Bank, is that the research staff spends about a third of their time doing operational work,
what used to be called cross-support. That is when a researcher goes out on an operational
mission. This is what I called “embodied dissemination.” It turns out the most effective way to
disseminate research results at the Bank is to take the researcher and send him or her out in the
field to incorporate the research results into the work of the Bank. That works better than just
about anything else.

In terms of the indigenous research capacity of member countries, the Bank in 1987 began to be
much more engaged because in 1987 the Bank became a charter member of the African
Economic Research Consortium. This organization, with headquarters in Kenya, was brought
into being by the Rockefeller Foundation to start a program of giving small grants to individual
researchers in Africa, with oversight from leading academics from around the world.

That was then followed in the ‘90s by the Economics Education and Research Consortium for
Russia and Ukraine, which I was very much involved with setting up, and which adapted the
AERC model. The Bank’s engagement is also reflected in the Global Development Network
that Lyn Squire has been managing for the past couple of years. The Bank now has a network of
research institutes, and there is significant funding. Originally, it flowed from the Research
Support Budget. It now flows from the Bank’s global grant facility.

But anyway, these objectives are all addressed by, institutionally, the Research Committee; by
cross-support; and now by initiatives like the African Economic Research Consortium, which is
now close to its 20th anniversary—quite remarkable.

ZIEGLER: The report that we’ve been discussing cited, and cited earlier here, notes that the
four objectives of the program, quote, “guide the current Bank’s research program as they
underline the twin functions that research performs in the Bank, both supporting Bank operations
as an intermediate input, important for the Bank’s role as policy adviser to developing countries,
and as one of the important final outputs of the Bank in keeping the Bank in the forefront of
thinking on the economics of developing countries and sharing research results with the
development community.”




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 20


In your view, did the intermediate input, over the years you were involved, provide value to the
Bank’s operational work commensurate with the costs of producing those products? And if so,
could you cite some examples?

Now, you mentioned sending researchers out into the field, which I thought was an interesting
point. I’ve always wondered, you know, research is over here and operations is over there; how
do you get the products of the research actually to be incorporated into what is going on in the
Bank, in a practical sense?

INGRAM: Let me tell you a personal anecdote. When I first came to the Bank, I joined the
Development Economics Department from Harvard University, where there was a common
concern: Here we are at Harvard University doing research, but how do we get the research into
the hands of policymakers? So I came to the Bank with the view that I was now at an institution
that contains both an operation/policy facility and a research facility. I thought that obviously
this institution would internalize all this, and that the problems that I had faced at Harvard
University would all be resolved by incorporating everything in the same organization. And
after I had been at the Bank for a few days, I was introduced to the “us versus them” discourse
about “here we are in research and those people over there are in operations”. I was baffled.
How could it be that there is a divide between research and operations, when the same guy signs
everybody’s payroll check? And I have to say it continues to be baffling, at some level. It
certainly surprised me at the time. But it is, in fact, real. It exists, and there is quite a
distinction—almost tribal—between the people who are on the research side and the people who
are on the operations side.

Let me make another comment, though. Other organizations also have an operations side and a
research side. What distinguishes the Bank from most of those other operations is that, for
example, if you are a pharmaceutical company, the people who are doing the research often have
very different skills from the operations people who are out visiting doctors and selling the
product. You can’t substitute one for the other. What’s interesting about the Bank is that a large
number of people in operations have substantial research credentials. In other words, they used
to be the guys in the lab wearing the white jackets. They took off the white jackets, and now
they are out in the field in the grey suits. So the fact that there are a substantial number of people
who can work on either side of the divide makes the barrier—the “us versus them”—even more
baffling, by the way, because one day you’re a researcher, another day you’re in operations. But
enough of this particular institutional paradox at the Bank.

Let me address the issue of what happens on the research side that is of some use in operations.
I’m going to talk about the intermediate inputs, and we can talk about publications and so on a
bit later.

I mentioned earlier work on computable general equilibrium models and social accounting
matrices. The first work that was done in the Bank on those was, in fact, done in the Research
Department, and the three authors were Dervis, de Melo, and Robinson [Dervis, Kemal, Jaime de
Melo and Sherman Robinson. General Equilibrium Models for Development Policy. Cambridge:



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 21


Cambridge University Press, 1982.]. Kemal Dervis, who went on to operations and became a
Regional vice president; Jaime de Melo, who left the Bank, was in research; as was Sherman
Robinson who also left the Bank. But they put out the first book. There was work on social
accounting matrices as well. These tools are widely used in operations.

A second thing that was of great influence in the Bank was the Development Economics
Department’s—under Stan [Stanley] Fischer—first analysis of structural adjustment lending, that
documented the social costs of the first round of structural adjustment lending [Nunberg,
Barbara. Public Sector Management Issues in Structural Adjustment Lending, WPS 217. The
World Bank, March 1990.] This contributed to structural adjustment lending’s bad name, and led
to reforms in structural adjustment lending.

I think the work on education documented the importance of primary education, which, in fact,
was and has been—but I’m not sure it continues to be—at the core of the Bank’s policy in
education. The Bank’s policy is very much to promote primary education, and not very much to
be in the business of funding secondary education, and particularly university education. It turns
out, though, if you look at the recent OED evaluation of education lending, although that’s the
Bank policy, over the last 15 years or so one-third of Bank lending in education, in fact, has gone
to university training. Quite an amazing inconsistency between what happened in the field and
what the policy was. But I think the research is right, and the policy was right. The policy
wasn’t necessarily implemented all that well.

There’s a lot of work on efficiency of transportation, metros versus buses, and so on, which has
had an impact on the Bank. The Bank has financed a few rail-based transit systems, but very
few.

The Bank has done a tremendous amount of research in agriculture. The one thing that comes to
mind is there was a long issue about the effect of farm size on productivity, and pretty
compelling work in DEC [Development Economics] made it clear that you typically found
smaller farms in areas where the land was more fertile. And if you did all of your analysis of
farm productivity without accounting for the differences in land fertility, you, in fact, got bizarre
results. So those are a couple of examples.

I think the Bank’s work on issues in regulation has also had some impact within the Bank. The
Bank’s impact on the outside, through its publications program, is notable. And we can talk
about that a little bit later in the interview.

ZIEGLER: I’m just going to change the tape here.

[End Tape 1, Side B]
[Begin Tape 2, Side A]




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 22


ZIEGLER: Concerning the final outputs mentioned in the previous question, Greg, did the
research program indeed keep the Bank in the forefront of thinking on the economics of
developing countries?

INGRAM: I think in many respects, but not all respects, yes. When I was doing reports on the
Bank’s research program I tried to determine how much money was being spent on development
research around the world, and particularly in other multilateral development banks. And the
answer was at that time the Bank was spending about $25 million a year, the Inter-American
Development Bank was spending about $2.5 million a year, and the other development banks
were spending essentially nothing. And at that time, Nancy Birdsall was vice president of the
Inter-American Development Bank, and she was extremely candid and forthright in her view,
which was, “We’re not going to do any research because the World Bank does the research, and
we’re just going to use their research.” So there was no gainsaying the role of the World Bank at
that time.

There’s a lot of university work that’s done on development economics. I never was able to get
a very good handle on it in terms of inputs. I was able to get a handle on it in terms of outputs, in
that the Bank produces 10 to 15 percent of the publications in development economics in the
world. I don’t know how that reflects inputs.

Now, in terms of, “yes, but not in all respects,” I already mentioned that, for example, in urban
economics, the Bank lost its edge in the mid-‘80s. I frankly don’t think it’s ever quite regained
its edge. So that’s a particular area where I don’t think it has been in the forefront, or pushing
the frontier. I think, in general, from the mid-‘90s, the Bank’s research on sectoral issues
diminished tremendously in terms of resources expended. I think that the Bank has spent a lot of
money on macro and economy-wide issues, and I think, yes, I think the Bank is at the forefront
of thinking in those areas.

There are some other challenges for the Bank, where I think the Bank has acquitted itself pretty
well, although it’s been tested a few times. One issue is when the thinking in the world about an
issue changes and where the Bank has a policy position on the issue. The Bank has been pretty
good about supporting research being undertaken and published which in fact undercuts the
current Bank policy stance. There have been a few issues around that, publishing material and
research findings that contradict current Bank policy. In one famous case a Bank staff member
did an analysis of the Free Trade Agreement with Mexico. The Bank’s view was that Mexico
was going to benefit tremendously from this. And this piece argued that actually Mexican
agriculture was not particularly going to benefit from this. And the then-Latin American vice
president was extremely annoyed that this piece was published, which turned out to be right, by
the way.

So there is often some short-term annoyance that accompanies such change. But the institution
has been pretty good about that. And I think, frankly, that’s the test of the institution on the
research side: that if you’re going to stay at the forefront, you have to allow people to put out
things that are inconsistent with your current policy stance.



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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ZIEGLER: Let me follow up on that. How tolerant is the Bank of dissent? I don’t mean
carping criticism by staff, but, you know, intelligent, intellectual, reasoned dissent or
disagreement with the party line, so to speak. What’s been your experience?

INGRAM: I think the Bank has been pretty good about it. Let me use a metaphor to explain
this. There are two U.S. corporations—one that no longer really exists—that had internal
research agencies. American Telephone and Telegraph Company had Bell Labs, and it
published The Bell Journal of Economics. If you were doing research in related fields like utility
regulation, and you were publishing something in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, you
would feel comfortable citing a document that had been published in The Bell Journal because
researchers viewed The Bell Journal as separate from AT&T’s corporate policy. The Bell Labs
were separate, and an intellectually respectable operation.

On the other side, General Motors has General Motors Research Labs. All the evidence I have is
there’s very little that comes out of General Motors Research Labs that’s inconsistent with
current GM policy. And I would never cite a document from GM Labs in a serious piece of
research that was not, say, highly technical. I suspect the stuff that comes out of GM Labs that
talks about the stoichimetric ratio of fuel mixtures and how fast the flame front moves through
the cylinder is probably okay. But I’m very suspicious of anything GM Research Labs has to say
about, say, transport policy. And you will very rarely see stuff from that lab cited in serious
literature.

The critical thing for the Bank, if it wants to maintain credentials on the research side and as an
intellectual leader, is that it has to be regarded by other researchers outside the Bank as being
intellectually respectable. And I think the Bank has done a pretty good job of that. Others
extensively cite Bank work. It’s referred to in academic journal articles. So I think the Bank—
looking across the whole range of research and its intellectual respectability—has done
reasonably well.

There have been a couple of cases of people trying to apply pressure. For example, Dennis [N.]
de Tray was head of the Research Advisory Staff when a Bank book had been published about
secure titles for agricultural land in Thailand. He got a note from a vice president, saying, “What
is this rubbish that the Bank is publishing? This is just a clear waste of Bank resources.” This
particular book [Gershon, Feder, et al. Land Policies and Farm Productivity in Thailand.
Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988] won a prize subsequently from the
American Agricultural Economics Association as one of the best pieces of empirical research
that year. The group that did this work influenced operations, and then the group that did this
research got a presidential award about three or four years ago because the Bank has lent a lot of
money for land titling projects in agriculture, all based on this research, which had originally
been trashed by a senior manager at the Bank.

I also remember when I was doing the WDR [World Development Report]–this is not a research
story, but it gives you an idea of an attitude—it is common to have text boxes in the WDR that



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                24


have examples of things. We were interested in some negative examples and had a couple of
text boxes with negative examples. I got a comment back from a country director who obviously
was unhappy about the fact that I was using his country as a source of a negative example. He
said as far as he was concerned, negative examples never served any useful purpose. The lesson
I drew from that is that managers only like negative examples from discredited regimes; that is to
say, if you want to use a negative example about something Fernando Marcos did, that’s okay.
But if there’s any sitting government that you want to hold up as a bad example of something,
the Bank is going to have a very hard time doing that for, essentially, diplomatic reasons. And
that’s something that I also have observed on the evaluation side. And we can talk about that
later.

But I think the Bank has done a reasonable job. I mean, you can look at the most recent episode,
which is Bill [William R.] Easterly’s book, and I mean my own view about that is . . .

ZIEGLER: This is the one on The Elusive Quest for Growth, right? [Easterly, William R. The
Elusive Quest for Growth. MIT Press, 2001.]

INGRAM: Yes.

ZIEGLER: He’s had two recently.

INGRAM: The first book he put out—he wrote the book, had it published outside the Bank,
and then he wrote an op-ed piece in The Financial Times. Everybody who is a senior staff in the
Bank knows you don’t write op-ed pieces in the press without clearing them through External
Affairs. He wrote the op-ed piece and claimed he didn’t know that. And he ultimately left the
Bank and has continued to pursue the logical conclusions of his empirical work. Bill is driven by
his empirical results. What he reports on is what he has found.

ZIEGLER: You’re saying he is intellectually honest.

INGRAM: He’s absolutely intellectually honest. But the business of going the op-ed route I
thought was a bit remarkable at the time.

ZIEGLER: I can recall in, I think it was around 1977, with the [Zulfikar Ali] Bhutto regime in
Pakistan, I was astonished to read a letter highly critical of that regime from Mahbub ul Haq,
when he was a Bank staff member. It was published in The Washington Post. Now, he managed
to weather the storm, but I was astonished that a senior Bank figure would roundly criticize a
sitting government.

INGRAM: When I grew up in the Bank, we all knew that you weren’t allowed to do that. You
weren’t allowed to write letters to the editor that would imperil Bank relationships with member
countries. And you’re not allowed to run for national office, or be politically active. And
basically, you don’t write op-ed pieces for the paper without talking to people in External




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                25


Affairs. It was a pretty amazing thing. But that having been said, he was at the time defended
by the chief economist, who was Nick [Nicholas H.] Stern.

ZIEGLER: I think you’re right.

INGRAM: And, you know, there’s a sense in which it sort of makes the case.

ZIEGLER: Yes.

INGRAM: There were a few other cases. There was a famous case—I don’t remember the
details of it—where a Bank staff working paper earned the wrath of Ernie [Ernest] Stern at one
point. But the thing is, when that happens, people never argue on the basis of the analysis. It’s
always the fact that people don’t like the conclusions. But I think the Bank has actually
acquitted itself pretty well.

That said, the Bank, I think, is in as much danger now as ever of seeming to use its research
publications as an arm of the External Affairs Department. The chief economist has to be
constantly vigilant about maintaining the integrity of the intellectual operations of the Bank
because there are lots of other people for whom that is not a priority. They don’t understand the
importance of that, and the chief economist really is the individual who has to wage that fight.
And the chief economists have acquitted themselves pretty well in that area.

ZIEGLER: In the summer of 1987, the World Bank underwent a thorough reorganization, or
some of us prefer to say, “disorganization,” but never mind.

INGRAM: Yes.

ZIEGLER: Among the results was the establishment of the Policy Planning and Research
Senior Vice Presidency. Did you have any role in formulating and establishing this new
organizational entity?

INGRAM: No, there was a committee of staff set up by [Barber B. ] Conable, and I was not a
member of the committee. I was not marching in the parade. I was standing on the sidelines or
standing in the road having it walk over me, whichever . . .

ZIEGLER: I had the good luck of being on the Executive Committee of the Staff Association
during the reorganization. That was “fun,” if I can put that in quotes.

INGRAM: Yes.

ZIEGLER: How did the reorganization of 1987 affect you personally?

INGRAM: Well, I had been director of the Development Research Department up until the
reorganization was implemented, and I emerged from that as senior adviser to the new urban



                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                  26


department, which was called the Transport and Urban Development Department , TUD, and
was headed by Louis [Y.] Pouliquen. I did that job for a year. So, yes, it moved me from one
job to another, from research management back to urban, not a particularly bad outcome.

MR. ZIEGLER: But in the institutional musical chairs, you found a seat.

INGRAM: Yes, or a seat found me. Those days were so peculiar. It was interesting to me how
the market cleared, and how personal information became paramount at that point. I engaged in
some of this myself. I would call up, for example, you, Charles Ziegler, and say, “Charles, my
name is Greg Ingram. We’ve never met, but we have a mutual friend named `X’, and I’ve talked
to that person, and they’ve recommended you. On the basis of their recommendation, I’d like to
offer you a job as a senior economist in such and such division.” And it was all done at that
level. I can remember calling people about jobs and being told, “Well, I’ve just accepted a job
somewhere else. Too bad you didn’t call me yesterday.” The whole thing was chaotic.

ZIEGLER: One person whom I consider knowledgeable has effectively said to me that he felt
that it introduced feudalism in the Bank. Rather than owing your allegiance to the institution,
people after the 1987 reorganization began to owe allegiance to a vice president or a department
director, or something like that.

INGRAM: That’s exactly true. This was—as a friend of mine put it—“follow my leader”, so
that large numbers of staff that were in the Central Policy Staff ended up in Latin America
because the vice president of Central Policy Staff moved to Latin America, and all of the
positions were filled with a cascade from the top down.

ZIEGLER: Or an avalanche, as I like to call it.

INGRAM: Yes.

ZIEGLER: I’m making my own views too transparent here.

INGRAM: Cascades or avalanches, I’m not sure which I prefer. In any case, it was a
remarkable time, and it certainly affected the attitude of the staff towards the institution. My
personal index was how many cars were parked in the Bank garage on Saturday. Shortly after
the reorganization, the Bank garages were empty on Saturday. A year later, by the way, a lot of
cars were in the garages on Saturday. It took a year for the place to come back. But basically,
people had the view, “I guess it is just a job,” instead of a calling. And it took a while for that to
change.

ZIEGLER: From your personal perspective, was the 1987 reorganization a success in
institutional terms? In other words, I think we both made our views somewhat clear on this
reorganization, but the point is did it—when things got shaken out, as you said, for instance a
year later people began to drift back and resume their old working habits. But were we a better
Bank as a result of the reorganization, when all is said and done?



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 27



INGRAM: I think there have been some positive outcomes and some negative outcomes. Let
me mention a negative outcome which took me 24 months to figure out, and let me make the
point with an example. Before the 1987 reorganization, there was an Urban Projects Division in
Latin America that covered the whole of Latin America. It had about 24 staff. There were
similar units that did lending for other sectors, and that was true for every Region. There was a
Regional division for each sector. If you have a Regional division for Latin America to do
agriculture projects, say, and it’s got 25 people in it, you can afford to have a dryland crops
expert, you can afford to have somebody who does nothing but work on dairy issues. You can
have, in a staff of 25, significant expertise on relatively narrow topics because you can spread
that person’s services over all 28 countries, or whatever it happens to be, in Latin America.

And what the reorganization did was to make the average size of units much smaller. It looks as
if, in retrospect, one of the objectives of the reorganization was to increase the number of
managerial jobs because the number of units increased significantly; therefore, the number of
managers increased significantly. But you went from having one unit with 25 people doing, say,
agricultural lending in Latin America, to having six units, each of which had four people. If
you’re in Brazil and you have a unit with, say, four to six people, and you’re doing all the
agricultural lending in Brazil, you can’t afford to have a dryland crops expert. You can’t afford
to have a dairy expert. What you need are four to six generalists who can handle virtually
everything.

What is really significant about the reorganization is by making the units smaller and making
them country focused—and it’s just sort of straightforward institutional reality, which would be
true in any organization—it changes the character of the staff. If you have a dryland crops expert
in Brazil’s division, and he leaves to go somewhere else, you have to fill his position. Are you
going to fill it with another dryland crops expert? No way. You’re going to fill it with
somebody who can handle all rain-fed agriculture, or something very much more broad. And so
when people look at the erosion of the technical skills of the Bank, it’s integrally related to the
average size of the units, to the average number of staff in the unit. And I don’t think people
have still figured that out in the Bank.

I remember talking to [Visvanathan] Rajagopalan about this after the reorganization, where he
was decrying the erosion of the technical staff. And I said, “Look, I’m an economist. You’ve
got these managers out there, and they’re making decisions. They’re doing the best they can.
They all think they’re doing the right thing. What can you possibly criticize about this?”

And it took quite a bit of time for me to realize that the average unit size has everything to do
with the skill composition of the staff. And so continued to this day—as a downside of the
reorganization is that we’ve ended up with small units, and that’s compromised the depth of the
technical expertise of the staff. And that’s not going to change until the average unit size
changes. It’s just straightforward organizational theory. It’s the sort of thing that is well known
outside the Bank, but not inside the Bank. The institution has this tremendous ability to resist or
reject outside knowledge about these things.



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 28



On the other hand, on the flip side of this, is there’s a lot to be said for country focus. There’s
very little—now speaking as an evaluator—there’s very little hard evidence that country focus
has bought us a lot. What we have to go on, the evaluative evidence so far, is based on going to
the country and asking people, “What do you think about having a country office in your
country?” And they say, “Oh, we like it. It’s better than it was before.” But there’s no other
evidence that we have. There’s no systematic evidence that we can use to evaluate the move to
country focus. And the move to country focus has progressed from ‘87 up to the point where
Wolfensohn decentralized staff. The whole decentralization change in the Bank has essentially
no evaluative evidence to date on its impact. We do know that it has not reduced costs.

ZIEGLER: Interesting.

INGRAM: We do know that the number of staff in the country offices has increased
dramatically, and we know that there are huge disparities in salaries between internationally-
recruited staff and locally-recruited staff. So when you hear that the Bank has decentralized and
you hear about the salary disparities, the first thing that comes to mind is, “Oh, the Bank is just
like Nike. We’re moving our production from North Carolina to Indonesia,” or whatever it
happens to be. In other words, we’re going to move production overseas to take advantage of
low-wage labor; therefore, we would expect our production costs to go down. Well, our
production costs did not go down. So that hasn’t happened. So then the question is: Has
efficiency or output gone up? Has the quality of the product gone up? We have no real evidence
about that. One would think that the quality of supervision should have increased because it
should be easier to supervise projects if you’re in the field.

ZIEGLER: When you say there’s no empirical data on it, has it been researched at all, though?

INGRAM: No. I have been to a few meetings about this issue. That’s where I learned that there
has been no cost reduction. So that’s actually an issue. But that’s well beyond the ‘87
reorganization.

ZIEGLER: Yes, but still very, very useful.

INGRAM: In a sense, there’s a consistent set of changes that have happened from ‘87 on that
have to do with country focus. And it would seem to me that country focus is a sensible thing.

You could have country focus, by the way, without having small sectoral units. There’s no
reason why you couldn’t have a country office in Brazil and still have an agricultural division
that serves all of Latin America because these small units dedicated to specific countries have
helped to raise costs. For example, if your lending program suffers because there’s a problem in
the country, it’s difficult to reallocate the staff, whereas, if you’re sitting with a Region-wide
division, it’s easy to reallocate the staff from one country to another. And so the inflexibility of
the staffing is another cost. But I think there are solutions to that.




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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 29


I will also say, by the way, that the sector side of the Bank is the most frequently reorganized
part of the Bank. Every couple of years things get changed, and it’s about to happen again. I
think it’s happening even as we speak.

ZIEGLER: Well, it’s 4:15. Do you want to continue a little further or . . .

INGRAM: Why don’t we finish up. We finished up the ‘87 reorganization. Maybe this is a
good place to stop. We have a lot to do yet.

ZIEGLER: Yes.

INGRAM: This is useful.

ZIEGLER: Thank you very much, Greg. I appreciate it very much, and we look forward to
talking to you the next time.

[End Tape 2, Side A]
[End of Session]




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                  30


                                             S es s i o n 2
                                      No v e mb er 2 0 , 2 0 0 6
                                      W a s h i n g to n , D.C.

[B eg i n T a p e 1 , S i d e A]

ZIEGLER: Today is November 20, 2006. My name is Charles Ziegler, a consultant with the
World Bank Group’s Oral History Program. I have with me in the World Bank Group Archives
Mr. Gregory K. Ingram, and we will be conducting the second session of his World Bank Oral
History Program interview.

Greg, I’m glad you could join the Oral History Program for a second session. You had an
interesting career in the Bank, so I think this is extremely useful. We’ll start just after the 1987
reorganization, which is more or less where we left off last time. After the 1987 reorganization,
you became, for about a year, the senior adviser in the Infrastructure and Urban Development
Department of the Sector Policy & Research Vice Presidency. What were your duties in that
capacity?

INGRAM: They were more on the intellectual side. I was involved in quality control,
particularly on the written output—we were producing a lot of working papers at that time—and
also helping set the agenda for the analytic work. I was working with Louis Pouliquen, who was
the director. His knowledge and expertise was somewhat more on transport, and mine was on
urban, so substantively I handled more of the urban side of the portfolio.

ZIEGLER: In July 1988, you became principal adviser to the Senior Vice President, Policy,
Planning & Research, W. David Hopper. How did that appointment come about?

INGRAM: David had been in the job, I guess, for about a year, and one had the sense—I didn't
particularly have the sense, but others had the sense—that he needed some help running his front
office. Stan Fischer, who I had known, observed that and suggested to David . . .

ZIEGLER: That's when he was senior economist at the Bank, right?

INGRAM: When he was chief economist of the Bank. Stan was observing that and suggested
to David that I might join him to help organize his front office.

ZIEGLER: What were your main duties as the principal adviser?

INGRAM: First and foremost, and surprisingly to me, it was error prevention. It turns out when
you're working for a senior vice president and various documents are coming out of the office
that he has signed or has pronounced upon, you really want to make sure it's all correct. It's
basically good staff work, making sure your guy doesn't look bad. I hadn't even imagined that as
being an important part of the job, and certainly when David and I had talked about the job there
was no mention of that, but it became it clear as soon as I got there that it was really important



                                            Gregory Ingram
                               July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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when memos go out, that your senior vice president looks like he has his act together. Such
quality assurance took a fair amount of time because of the large paper flow.

ZIEGLER: Somewhat naively if I could ask, were your main reviews before he looked at the
material or after—you say he signed off on these, so presumably he wasn't writing it all himself?

INGRAM: No, both actually. It was both, because he also would make changes, and so at the
end of the day, when the document's going to go to the Print Shop, if it doesn't make sense, that
would be a real issue. I also briefed him for meetings.

In addition, when he was in town, which wasn't all the time because he traveled a fair amount,
there was a weekly staff meeting of all the vice presidents and directors in the domain that he
was directing. I organized those meetings and set their agendas. Those meetings turned out to
be a major management tool, because all of the policy papers that were being written for all the
sectors came to those meetings for review and discussion. So any policy product that came out
of the senior vice presidency came through this meeting and was discussed there.

The third thing I did, which took a lot of time as well, was to oversee preparation of the overall
budget and work program for the senior vice presidency. These were the days when Bob
[Robert] Picciotto was running the budget side and the budget process became progressively
elaborate. I was preparing large volumes of work program and budget documents. This wasn’t
something you did a month before the budget was submitted. This was something that went on
most of the year.

So those are the three major things that I was doing for David and also for Wilfried [P.]
Thalwitz, when he replaced David.

ZIEGLER: How would you characterize your relationship with Mr. Hopper and his successor,
Wilfried Thalwitz?

INGRAM: I thought we were quite simpatico. I admired both men. They were quite different.
David Hopper has a brilliant mind, and a relatively short attention span, particularly with respect
to management issues. He didn't have a lot of tolerance for management.

To give you an idea, I would brief him for the Management Council or President's Council
meetings. I would walk over to the meeting with him, which wasn't so far away—we were all on
the 12th floor—and I would brief him while we were walking to the meeting. By the time he got
to the meeting door, he got the messages, he'd thought of a joke to introduce it, and he was ready
to go. He took a briefing better than anybody I worked with at in the Bank. He was just very,
very quick. But as I said, management was not something he had a lot of patience for.

Wilfried was a caring and committed Bank hand—one of nature’s noblemen. He was dedicated
to the institution, and what he was trying to do was to increase the connectivity between the
policy shop and operations. That was his objective.



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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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ZIEGLER: Was he successful in that effort, do you think?

INGRAM: I think he was as successful as one could be. He did spend a lot of time agonizing
about it. Paul Isenman, who joined the front office, and I would prepare speeches for him.
Wilfried was constantly revising the speeches. He revised the speech up until the minute he
walked into the room.

ZIEGLER: The reason I ask is because one of the things that’s always interested me is, in terms
of when we take operations, how the different policy sides feed into operations. How do you
translate, for instance, research results into practical operational results, and the same with
development policy, even Operations Evaluation, which we’ll get into later with you?

INGRAM: That’s an interesting question, and this may repeat or anticipate other things that
we’ll talk about.

One of the ways—the most effective way, in my experience—of translating research into policy
is through what I called embodied dissemination. That is, you send the researcher off on the
mission and he interacts with the people on the mission, then his chapter on the housing sector or
his chapter on public finance reform or whatever certainly reflects the current thinking.

There are other sorts of instruments, such as Bank policies. For example, you can look at the
Bank's education policy, which gave and has given for a long-time pride of place to investments
in primary education. The policy position of giving priority to primary education is based on
research that the Bank carried out. The rate of return to primary education is very high in
countries where literacy rates are relatively low. And the Bank's education policy for the last 20
years or so has emphasized investments in primary education. That's something whose roots go
right back to research done inside the Bank and outside the Bank as well.

ZIEGLER: A review of the activity's background paper for a Board seminar on what had been
renamed the Policy Research & External Affairs Senior Vice Presidency, or PRE, dated July 12,
1990, states, “The objective of PRE is to increase the Bank's effectiveness and leadership in
anticipating, emphasizing, and resolving key development problems.” The means by which this
ambitious objective was to be obtained included research and policy work; gathering,
assembling, and disseminating economic financial and social data; acting as a conduit between
the Bank and the outside world, including responsibility for what was then the Economic
Development Institute and the External Affairs Department; acting as a repository of specialized
technical expertise needed on a Bank-wide basis for ensuring that the Bank remain up to date in
its skills; and for promoting professional synergy among the specialists in central and Regional
technical departments.

This seems to me—admittedly as an outsider in this matter—a rather large span of control over
units performing somewhat disparate functions. In your view, what were the primary challenges




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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in managing the senior vice presidency, and do you believe the challenges were successfully
addressed?

INGRAM: The challenge that we faced in PRE was making the whole at least equal to the sum
of the parts. I have to say this characterizes the challenge for the entire institution. So since this
senior vice presidency embodied a lot of the Bank, it’s not surprising that Bank-wide problems
would manifest themselves there.

The major instruments for coordinating activities were the budget and work program that I just
talked about. We did spend a lot of time and energy getting the budget incentives right, and
making clear what we thought the priorities were that were worth paying for.

There was a second instrument of these weekly meetings that I mentioned, which was to have all
of the vice presidents and directors discuss whatever current major policy paper or policy project
the senior vice presidency is working on. Every sector paper came forward and came through
this meeting.

By the way, one thing almost got to be a standing joke for me. Virtually every sector paper that
came up proposed there should be a dedicated tax for the sector. For example, there should be
earmarked revenue for primary education, there should be earmarked revenue for road
maintenance, and there should be earmarked revenue for agriculture research, whatever. And at
this meeting, all of these earmarked taxes would be challenged and pretty much taken out of the
papers. So there was a set of similar views, or a narrowness of vision in some sense, at the sector
level. When you got all the sector managers together, however, they did tend to take a broader
view.

PRE was also responsible for staff training, and a certain amount of work went on in that area.
Stan Fischer convened a task force, for example, to examine staff training, one of the first of a
number of such working groups that the Bank had put together in the last 15 to 20 years.

I think that the potential loose end in this was External Affairs. External Affairs certainly came
to the meetings and participated in them, but it’s not entirely clear to me that there were real
benefits to External Affairs; I don’t think they benefited to the same extent as the sector vice
presidencies from the interchange.

But let me make an additional comment here. PRE brought together both development
economics and all the sectors. The management of the sectors in the Bank has always been a
challenge. I think if you look at the history of the Bank in the 27 years I was in it, the central
sector departments were reorganized more frequently than any other part of the Bank. That may
be going on even as we speak now as sundry sector vice presidencies are being consolidated.
The Bank has never quite settled on how to manage those central sector departments.

ZIEGLER: Do you have a particular view as to how they should be managed, or are you still
looking also?



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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 34



INGRAM: I think when all the sectors became vice presidencies that they became a bit top
heavy.

In the time that we were talking about in PRE, the sectors were departments ,and there was a
single vice president. At the time of these meetings we’re talking about, it was Rajagopalan, and
then there were five sector departments below him. Subsequently the sector departments
blossomed into vice presidencies, and I don’t think that was particularly a good idea. I think that
actually reduced communication across the sectors.

There’s something else that happened, which we’ll get to, I think, in a minute, and that is in the
’90s—not in this period but five years after the period we're talking about now—the Bank
essentially reduced the resources going into sector research very significantly, and I think that
has harmed the sectors quite a bit.

ZIEGLER: Yes. In researching questions and topics for this interview, I came across in the
files a draft that you had prepared, apparently for Mr. Thalwitz, of an introduction for a 1990
colloquium on policy directions. In it you wrote, quote:

       “I want to assure you that there is no black box or secret process that determines
       the Bank's development agenda. Rather ,there is a collaborative process that we in
       PRE coordinate but that the whole Bank and the development community at large
       contribute to. To identify and screen ideas we draw on the experience of
       operations, including their innovation and experimentation, PRE's own program of
       research, evaluation, and policy work, and a wide range of contacts among
       analysts and practitioners in our borrower and donor countries. One of my key
       objectives is to increase the effectiveness of this virtuous circle that constantly
       improves our knowledge and our operations and identifies new challenges.”

Unquote. Please reflect and expand on ways in which the Bank's development agenda was
coordinated by PRE, and how it would endeavor to increase the effectiveness of what you call
the “virtuous circle.”

INGRAM: Okay. First of all, the research staff that were in PRE—certainly in DEC, but there
were also at that time some research staff in the sector departments—normally would spend
about 30 percent of their time on cross-support. So through what I call embodied dissemination,
a third of the staff time of the researchers was spent on operational missions. They were out
interacting with operational staff and acquainting themselves with issues in the field. So there
was a strong link there.

There's also a fairly strong link between the research community in the Bank and the research
community outside the Bank. I once did an analysis toward the end of my term as director of the
Development Research Department of where the staff in the department came from and where
they went. About 80 percent of the staff in the research department came from outside the Bank.



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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Of those who then left the department, about half left the Bank and went back to academia, and
half went into operations. So this flow of personnel is another source of interaction and
embodied dissemination between research and the Bank. There’s also a bit of movement back
from operations to research, but not very much.

There was also a Research Committee, which usually was peopled by, among others, the
regional chief economists. The Research Committee’s job was to advise the chief economist of
the Bank about the research program and to take decisions about funding of larger research
projects. So there is a strong link between research priorities and the senior managers, at least
the senior managers on the analytic side of operations. And the Research Committee’s role was
expanded during this time period. It had been reduced significantly when Anne Krueger had
been chief economist of the Bank. She had set up an additional body—the Research Policy
Council—above it to manage her large comparative projects, and the Research Committee's role
was diminished. Subsequently, when Stan Fischer came back, this other body disappeared and
the Research Committee resumed its more traditional role of interacting and linking research to
operations.

So those I think are the key links. I have to say again here that External Affairs did not play a
very significant role in this.

There was a strategic planning group, though set up after the '87 reorganization. It existed for
two-and-a-half to three years. It grazed all over the Bank, intellectually speaking, and it was
doing things like trying to anticipate coming issues. It made a list of what it thought the next five
WDR topics would be. And in retrospect, of the next five WDR topics, it correctly identified four
of them. Moreover, the strategic planning unit of the Bank was the one group that was actually
saying things that turned out to be useful about what might happen in the Soviet Union. Not
many people in the Bank believed them . . .

ZIEGLER: Or anywhere else.

INGRAM: Or anywhere else.

ZIEGLER: All the prognostications on the Soviet Union—well, many of them—were way off,
from what I recall.

INGRAM: The strategic planning unit of the Bank did pretty well. And then after about two-
and-a-half or three years, it was abolished and has never returned.

ZIEGLER: Do you recall who was the head of that . . . ?

INGRAM: Alex [Alexander] Shakow was, I believe, head of it, and there was a fellow from
Peru, who's name I will think of in a minute [Francisco R. Sagasti], and Bob [Robert B.]
Liebenthal.




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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But anyway, the basic point of this comment is that it isn’t the case that the chief economist is in
a vacuum or lives in a hermetically sealed chamber. In fact, the chief economist and the research
staff are mixing it up with the rest of the Bank, and the rest of the Bank is mixing it up with
them. That was the thought that was behind this “virtuous circle.” Given the turnover of staff on
the research side, which is fairly high, and the movement of them either into operations or out of
the Bank, you don't get a lot of rigidity on the research side. I mean . . .

ZIEGLER: In what sense?

INGRAM: I'll call it intellectual rigidity. I think the research side of the Bank was probably
less flexible when Hollis was there, because Hollis had a view about structural change as a way
of analyzing the economy, and he was also drawn to large-scale models. He was quite tolerant
intellectually of other people doing other things, but he certainly didn't spend any of his time or
energy working on them. But I think the research side of the Bank has been pretty eclectic, and
an awful lot of interesting things have bubbled up on the research side over time.

ZIEGLER: Did the accession of the states that composed the Soviet Union and the states of
Eastern Europe affect the work of PRE to any significant degree? Because that was going on
when you were there.

INGRAM: Indeed. The answer is yes. There was a group of people led by John [A.] Holsen,
who did a white paper on what could be done in the Soviet Union and what role the Bank would
play [International Monetary Fund, World Bank, OECD and EBRD. The Economy of the USSR:
A Study Undertaken in Response to a Request by the Houston Summit. Vols. I-III, 1990].

In addition, Stan Fischer set up a division headed by Alan [Harold] Gelb in the research
department specifically to study economies in transition [Socialist Economies Reform Unit].
That in some sense reflects the sort of flexibility point I was mentioning earlier. So yes, a unit
was set up, which is of course—as I said in the earlier part of the interview—the way the Bank
responds to change. You can't just tell people to do something. If you really want to send a
signal to the staff that environment's important, you set up an environment department. And
basically, Stan set up a division of transition economies. And Alan Gelb then went on, by the
way, to do the transition World Development Report, which was in '96 [World Development
Report 1996: From Plan to Market].

ZIEGLER: In March 1991, you became the Research Advisory Staff administrator. What
were the circumstances leading to that appointment?

INGRAM: Dennis de Tray had been running the Research Advisory Staff in DEC for quite
some time, and Dennis went off to become a division chief in Colombia, which is an example of
somebody moving from research to operations. That position came open—Johannes Linn at that
time was playing an advisory role in Larry [Lawrence H.] Summers’ front office, and Johannes
suggested I might be a good candidate. I had a conversation with Wilfried, and he thought it was




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                37


a good idea, so off I went, and I was happy to do that. It brought me back to research and
research management.

ZIEGLER: Which feeds into the next question, which is: what were your primary functions
and responsibilities as Research Advisory Staff administrator?

INGRAM: First of all, to manage the Research Support Budget, which is an internal fund in the
Bank. At the time that I moved there, it was about $5 million a year. It’s used to fund research
proposals that are written by Bank staff or sponsored by Bank staff, rather unique among
corporate enterprises. The Research Support Budget is essentially competitively allocated. It’s
extremely rare to have any resources allocated competitively within a corporate environment, yet
the RSB is allocated in this way.

In reviewing research proposals, different processes were applied to requests for different
amounts of money. I could personally approve requests up to $30 to $35,000. From $35 to
$100,000 there would be one external and one internal review, and above $100,000, two external
reviews. The Research Committee would review all these larger proposals. And the Research
Committee’s job was to advise the chief economist, who decided what to fund. So my
responsibility was to oversee the reviewing of all the proposals—and we got about a hundred
proposals a year—setting the agenda for the Research Committee, and managing the budget.

ZIEGLER: This is how it became—this is how it could be described as competitive, then, this
sort of percolating up from—it's a bottom-up process . . .

INGRAM: Anybody in the Bank could send in a research proposal. So it could come from
DEC, it could come from operations, it could come from the sector department. Anybody, any
professional in the Bank could submit a research proposal, and they did.

Second, the office managed the Bank’s journals. The [World] Bank Research Observer and the
World Bank Economic Review were established by Anne Krueger, and the editors were members
of the Research Advisory Staff. When I arrived, Mark Gersovitz was hired as the editor of both
journals. Subsequently, Moises Syrquin became editor of both journals. Then the decision was
made to separate the editorship, so toward the end of my term Shantayanan Devarajan became
editor of the Research Observer, and Francois [J.] Bourguigon became editor of the World Bank
Economic Review [WBER]. Shortly after that he, of course, became chief economist of the
Bank, but he had been editor of the WBER.

ZIEGLER: Did it have anything to do with the Finance and Development?

INGRAM: No. I actually was on the editorial board of Finance and Development for four or
five years in the 1980s, but my office had nothing to do with that. Finance and Development
was funded out of the Office of the Publisher.




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                38


When Mark Malloch Brown came in as the head of External Affairs, he carried out a survey of
opinion makers around the world, and he decided that the Bank should withdraw its funding
from Finance and Development.

ZIEGLER: It had been set up jointly with the Fund back in the ‘60s; 1964, I believe.

INGRAM: That's exactly right. And it was published in, I believe, seven languages. About
250,000 copies were printed, and it was costing the Bank $900,000 a year. If you went into any
minister's office in any developing country, Finance and Development was sitting on the coffee
table for visitors to read. Mark, in his wisdom, decided it didn't make any sense and withdrew
funding from it. The Fund, of course, has continued with it, and it continues to this day.

I have to say I was surprised at the decision to withdraw Bank support from Finance and
Development. It never made sense to me at the time because its reach was extraordinary and
continues to be extraordinary.

ZIEGLER: And so, well, Finance and Development, so . . .

INGRAM: That's right. The whole thing was bizarre, but that's what happened. But, no, the
Research Advisory Staff had nothing directly to do with Finance and Development.

ZIEGLER: You had been, of course, in the research complex before; now, in the scheme of
things, you've returned. Did you notice any significant changes from your previous time in the
research complex?

INGRAM: Yes. But before I answer that question, let me mention one other thing that the
Research Advisory Staff did, and that is, it managed the Policy Research Working Papers, and
the Bank at that time was putting out about 250 Policy Research Working Papers a year. So we
oversaw those papers and their printing and placement on the web. While they were
disseminated on the web, they were not formal "publications."

Now, turning to the significant changes from my previous time in the research complex, yes, in
the early '90s—as I mentioned earlier—there was a significant decline in Bank expenditure on
research. Bank expenditures declined in nominal dollars, from something like $32 million to
about $25 million in the early '90s.

ZIEGLER: Did you ever find any reason for that, and how was this decision taken? Do you
have any idea?

INGRAM: Yes. Shortly after I went to the Research Advisory Staff, I had lunch with Sven
Sandstrom, and Sven asked me if DEC would be able to carry out sector research instead of the
sector departments. And I said to him, "Yes, it could. If management wanted to transfer the
responsibility for doing sector research to DEC, DEC could do it, but it wouldn't be able to do it
if they didn't transfer the resources that would enable them to do the research." And



                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                39


management proceeded to transfer the responsibility but not the resources, and there was a
profound decline in sector research in the Bank over that time period. And this was documented
in the research reports that I sent to the Board. We had graphs showing what was happening.
And DEC, which historically had been doing around half of the research in the Bank, then
emerged doing 70 to 80 percent of the research in the Bank. But the pie shrank in terms of non-
inflation adjusted dollars being spent on research, with a profound shrinkage on the sector side.
That was the big change.

ZIEGLER: Did you ever find the reason why—the reason for the change?

INGRAM: No. I'm assuming that resources were tight, and to save money they made the
decision to cut the research budget because that's what they did. They essentially reduced
research at the Bank.

This occurred a bit before, but continued on, during the time that we started talking about a
knowledge bank. And it was supremely ironic that at the time when the Bank was beginning to
promote itself as a source of knowledge, that its actual expenditures on research went down quite
significantly.

This also marked the end of research in the sector departments. This is when the sector directors
became vice presidents, or in the jargon there were thematic vice presidencies known as TVPs.
When those were set up, their staff was told not to book time against research. Those
departments had many staff that were capable of doing research. This led to a huge reduction in
research in the sector departments and on the sectors themselves. A few staff would still get
money from the Research Support Budget, but it became much more difficult.

When Michael [P.] Bruno was recruited as chief economist of the Bank, he later shared with me
that he was told by [Lewis T.] Preston that research expenditures at the Bank would be reduced,
and Michael would have to come on board knowing that and supporting it. So this was a
management decision. What the rationale for it was, I don't know, but it was not an accident.
This was not an unintended consequence. Management wanted to do something and they did it.
Again, it's a peculiar decision, given the role of the Bank in the world.

ZIEGLER: Yes.

In a July 15, 1991, memorandum to development economics directors and senior staff on the
results of a recent DEC retreat, chief economist Lawrence H. Summers wrote the following,
recalling the culture of DEC: "The need here is for more movement away from writing long,
unexceptionable, and unenlightening papers. We should prepare executive summaries before—
not after— papers are written in the future. They should contain evidence-backed propositions
with which a sensible person could conceivably disagree, not bland generalities. I also expect to
see increased efforts to involve individuals who do not toe the Bank line in our work." Unquote.
One can understand why he encountered difficulties in the Bank and at Harvard. In your
experience, did DEC move in the directions hoped for by Larry Summers?



                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                40



INGRAM: Yes. And before I do that, let me give you another relevant Summers’ anecdote. He
once came into a meeting and read the first paragraph of an executive summary of a paper, and
then he re-read it. I don’t remember what it was about, but let’s assume for a minute that it was
about local public finance. He re-read it substituting the health sector for local public finance,
and it still made perfect sense. He observed that if you changed the major nouns in a paper and it
still made sense, that was an example of a paper that was not saying anything of any
significance. Larry has a way of making his point in a memorable fashion.

I think the big change in DEC that happened around this time was the beginning of the
production of Policy Research Reports. I don’t know how many of them have been put out by
now, but probably 15 or 20. The first one dealt with the East Asian Miracle. A Policy Research
Report is a 200-page book that essentially takes Larry’s view of putting together so-called
evidence-backed propositions and making assertions. It’s not so much basic research.

Another way of making the same point would be to take the style of the World Development
Report, which is to mobilize information and embody it in a storyline with a set of messages.
The storyline and the messages are derived from research, but the World Development Report is
not an original research document. It’s more of a research digest.

The Policy Research Reports that DEC was putting out were not as extreme in this style as the
WDR, but they were not reporting on individual research projects. They were putting together
material from many sources to produce “a view of the East Asian Miracle” or “a view of reform
in the financial sector,” or whatever it happens to be.

The other thing that has happened progressively over time, which is also consistent with this, is
the spin off of a set of products that were embodied in the original design of the WDR. The
original World Development Report had Section 1 and Section 2. Section 1 was a review of the
global economy, and Section 2 had a thematic focus. When Stan Fischer was chief economist,
he took Section 1 out and turned it into a stand-alone document, which is the Global Economic
Report that's done now. Subsequently the set of tables in the back of the WDR were pulled out
and turned into World Development Indicators. So the WDR has been disassembled into
component pieces, and those pieces are now marketed as separate accessible documents.

There's been a move in the Bank to produce what I'll call more accessible, more message-laden
research reports, which digest research and pass it along to readers. So I think there has been
some response to Larry's observation.

ZIEGLER: He also says here about expecting to see increased efforts to involve individuals
who do not toe the Bank line in our work. What's you feeling—well, what’s your experience
with—how do I put it—rational or reasoned dissent in these matters? I'm not talking about
carping criticism, but to me the Bank has never—from my rather lowly perspective, the Bank has
never struck me as being particularly friendly toward those with different views from that of the
institution. William Easterly would probably be a classic example of that.



                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                41



INGRAM: Indeed, we discussed Bill Easterly earlier. There were other cases that involved
Policy Research Working Papers reviewed by the Research Advisory Staff. And we had more
than one dispute about Policy Research Working Papers where a particular piece of research was
done and it led to a conclusion that made a Regional vice president unhappy.

I mentioned one example earlier. A paper was produced about what the effect of the North
American Free Trade Agreement would be on Mexico. The researcher argued that there would
be some costs borne by the Mexican economy, not just benefits. And the Regional vice president
took great umbrage at that, and spent some energy trying to get this report removed, but was
unsuccessful.

There was another case involving Ernie Stern. He was senior vice president of the Bank and
took exception to a report, which took a position that he personally disagreed with.

So, yes, there had been cases like that, typically about one case a year in my experience
involving Policy Research Working Papers.

ZIEGLER: But were these reports quashed as a result?

INGRAM: No, they weren’t once they were Policy Research Working Papers. There was
another case where a report didn’t get to me, and was quashed for a while. It involved an
analysis of automobile restrictions in Mexico City, which were designed to reduce air pollution.
The author of that piece analyzed a scheme that involved restricting car use based on odd-
numbered and even-numbered license plates. One could drive an odd-numbered one on one day,
and an even one the next. What he found was that people were buying additional cars. And of
course, the additional cars they were buying tended to be older cars, which were highly polluting
cars. So old highly polluting cars were being kept on the street longer than they would have
otherwise, and he argued this was actually degrading air pollution in Mexico City. This made
the division chief for Mexico very unhappy, and he made life very difficult for this author.
However, the paper was eventually published in an academic journal. There are certainly lots of
cases in the Bank where there has been dissent about research findings, but in general the Bank
has handled that fairly well.

[End Tape 1, Side A]
[Begin Tape 1, Side B]

ZIEGLER: What were the major areas of emphasis in World Bank research activities during
your time as administrator of the Research Advisory Staff, and was there a significant evolution
in these areas over this time period?

INGRAM: The areas that consistently received the most resources were macroeconomics,
adjustment, and growth, the basic set of macroeconomic issues. Research on trade, which had
grown significantly when Anne Krueger was chief economist, then came back again in the ’90s.



                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                42


There was a renewed interest in trade negotiations, renewed interest in the southern cone, and
then the sequencing of trade liberalization, and work on finance. There was a fair amount of
work on East Asia.

On the sector side, the one sector which did better than all the other sectors was environment,
which used a mix of internal funding and a great deal of external funding for research.

ZIEGLER: Which units in the Bank were in your view most supportive of research efforts, and
which the least?

INGRAM: Obviously, Development Economics is very supportive of research. That’s what
they do, and it’s the main part of their work program. The Regional chief economists have
always been very supportive of research at the Bank. Beyond that, there are individuals scattered
all over the Bank who are very supportive of research.

If you think of the Bank as a big industrial enterprise, the research staff do the research, and
other people are on the production floor making the widgets, or whatever it happens to be. In the
Bank there are significant numbers of people on the “shop floor”—that is, in operations—who
have quite credible research credentials and significant lists of publications.

There is a net movement of staff from research to operations. That means that operations has
many very capable people who are well informed, have views, and have a lot of research
capability. That distinguishes the Bank from most other organizations, where it's usually the
case that the operations staff and the research staff have very different skills. The Bank has a
tremendous infusion of research capabilities through the institution. Research is widely
supported in the Bank, and that's one of the reasons why staff from anywhere in the Bank can ask
for support from the Research Support Budget. There are qualified people throughout the Bank
who want money and have ideas, so it's a great opportunity for them.

ZIEGLER: Please discuss the interrelationships between the Economic Development Institute,
which of course is now the World Bank Institute, and Bank research in general, and DEC in
particular.

INGRAM: The EDI/WBI has reported to the chief economist of the Bank on and off. For
example, when I was the director of the Development Research Department, EDI did not report
to the chief economist. That was partly because Anne Krueger's husband was working at EDI,
and it wasn't administratively feasible to have that happen. After the '87 reorganization, of
course, EDI was incorporated into PRE and there was a reporting relationship to the chief
economist that continued until Joe Stiglitz was chief economist of the Bank. About year or so
into Joe's tenure as chief economist of the Bank, the World Bank Institute was abruptly removed
from DEC and set up on its own, at which point the head of WBI became a vice president in the
Bank.




                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 43


The way that happened was that WBI had a large budget, and Joe announced that all DEC units
would at the beginning of the fiscal year allocate five percent of their budgets to the chief
economist’s office for reallocation. Shortly after Joe issued that ukase, the World Bank Institute
was transferred from his control.

ZIEGLER: So there.

INGRAM: So there. But in any case, the chief economist has played varying roles with respect
to WBI, and it’s been separate from DEC since it was moved away from Joe, but it had been
separated at other times in the past.

The other comment I’ll make is that the World Bank Institute develops a lot of teaching material.
It doesn’t really carry out research. Although it has some of its own publications, its publications
tend to be teaching material. It has used and drawn on some DEC research, and drawn on some
DEC researchers. Over time, my impression—from the time I first joined the Bank—is that the
World Bank Institute has become much more self-contained. In the late '70s I would give
lectures in EDI, as would other non-EDI staff. There was lots of movement of staff back and
forth. My impression is that that has attenuated significantly.

ZIEGLER: It was that way at the very beginning, too. I remember doing some historical
research on it. One of the things that would happen is that people from the Bank would come
over and give lectures to the students, give them the benefit of their experience.

INGRAM: That’s right. My impression is that largely came to an end.

The other thing that happened was the World Bank Institute was given responsibility for Bank
staff training. My own view has been that was a very risky thing to do because the staff are in
the building and can really lobby the World Bank Institute if things aren't going well, and the
other clients that the World Bank Institute has just don't have the same entrée, and they don't
have the same leverage. So by giving them responsibility for training staff, my fear was that the
staff training would take over the Institute. I don't know that that's happened particularly, but I
do think that was not a very good idea.

ZIEGLER: Sort of like the inmates taking over the asylum?

INGRAM: Well, it's the urgent crowding out the important. The guy next door comes over and
pounds on your desk, whereas your client in a developing country just can't be as compelling.

ZIEGLER: Mr. James D. Wolfensohn arrived as president of the World Bank in mid-1995 with
a reform agenda very much in mind. Did he undertake to make any significant changes in the
Bank's research complex?

INGRAM: No, not really. Michael Bruno was chief economist to the Bank, having been
appointed by Preston, and Jim Wolfensohn had a lot of respect for Michael Bruno. Bruno in



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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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return, I think, handled Jim Wolfensohn very well. He taught Jim a lot of macro when he could.
So no, Jim did not intervene in the research complex very much at all.

ZIEGLER: It never struck me that that was his primary focus of interest in any case. He wasn’t
a research type.

INGRAM: Well, at the same time, Jim Wolfensohn was the chairman of the board of the
Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton . .

ZIEGLER: That is true.

INGRAM: . . and it wasn’t all clear coming in what would happen. But as events turned out, he
did not view research as a place to spend his energy, and that was either because it wasn’t on his
priority list, or it was because he didn’t think that’s where the problems were, or both.

ZIEGLER: How would you characterize the involvement with the Bank’s research complex of
Presidents [Robert S.]? McNamara, [Alden W.] Clausen, Conable, and Preston?

INGRAM: McNamara brought Hollis Chenery in as the first full-blown chief economist, setting
up a research program. Hollis set up the Research Committee; he set up the external research
fund; he set up this internal competition, which continues to this day. So McNamara really
formalized research at the Bank through Hollis and was very supportive of Hollis, certainly up
until the last couple of years of the regime, I would think.

Clausen appointed Anne Krueger as chief economist. He pretty much ignored research. I was
director of the Research Department for four years, and I never had any particular
communications with Clausen about anything. He was just not particularly interested in
research, or less interested in research than other aspects of what the Bank did.

Conable was interested in and supported research at the Bank. He brought Stan Fischer in, who
was just a terrific chief economist. He also brought in Larry Summers. So he thought about it,
and was fairly interested. Again, he didn’t intervene particularly, but he made, I thought, very
good appointments.

Preston was quite supportive of World Development Reports, but it was under Preston’s regime
that the research funding was cut.

ZIEGLER: As you mentioned, yes.

INGRAM: And then he brought in Michael Bruno and told Michael up front, “Hey, we're doing
less research. Know that when you come in the door.”

ZIEGLER: You co-authored a DEC note dated March 1996 entitled "World Bank Research in
the Marketplace of Ideas." This publication stated, quote, "Recent surveys have found that the



                                          Gregory Ingram
                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                 45


Bank’s research is widely disseminated, well regarded, and influential," unquote. Can you
identify any trends with regard to dissemination of the Bank’s research findings, the regard in
which they were held, and their influence between your earlier time in the research complex and
your time as administrator of the Research Advisory Staff, and, if so, offer some reasons for
these trends?

INGRAM: Yes. Let me mention some of the elements that support this statement you just read
about research being widely disseminated.

As administrator of the Research Advisory Staff, I took a report to the Board on the Bank’s
research program every two years, and I started turning those reports into evaluative
documents—evaluating the Bank's research. We did various things in those reports. First of all,
we identified the Bank's bestsellers, that is, how many copies of how many volumes were sold.
Looking for those bestsellers, we determined the Bank had no records about how many copies it
had sold of anything, but it did know how many it had printed, and it did know how many were
left in the warehouse. So we subtracted those two. And then using those numbers, we identified
the Bank's bestsellers.

By the way, we learned that if a book moved 8 or 9,000 copies, it would be in the top 10. The
best, most widely disseminated book the Bank ever put out sold about 60,000 copies because it
became a textbook in agricultural economics courses.

The second thing we did was to tabulate citation counts of Bank output using the Social Science
Research Citation index, and that has been done about every five years now for the last 15 years.
We looked at the use of Bank reports in graduate courses in development economics.
Individuals outside the Bank compile reading lists and publish them. We looked at those more
than once, and we found that half of the documents on these reading lists were Bank
publications.

By the way, an interesting footnote to this is that the World Development Report is used on
virtually every graduate student reading list in economic development, but it receives virtually no
citations, and that's because it's not original research. If you cite the WDR, it would be as a straw
man saying, for example, “Some people believe tenure security promotes agricultural output, see
World Development Report,” and then they would proceed to attack that position. So the WDR is
rarely cited but widely read—a very interesting tradeoff.

We looked at the journals that the Bank puts out and their citation levels, and we determined that
the Bank journals were among the most cited development economics journals. I believe the
Observer is the second most cited development journal. We looked at the mentions of Bank
work by the economists, by the Financial Times, and by others in the press. We found, by the
way, that among newspapers, the Financial Times mentions the World Bank more than any other
newspaper and the Economist more than any other business magazine, probably confirming what
you suspected. We did a survey of 250 country users of Bank research and we surveyed Bank
staff, so our findings had evidence behind them.



                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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In terms of the change over time, I think the major change in research over time has been what I
called earlier the production of more compendiums of research, the production of more volumes,
which have the Bank’s imprint on them. For example, Anne Krueger set up the Bank’s journals.
Earlier, Hollis had argued against the Bank having journals, his idea being that the Bank’s work
would be more credible if it’s in journals that are reviewed externally. The counter argument was
that such publication makes the Bank’s research invisible. So the Bank journals were put in
place largely to promote Bank work. I talked about Policy Research Reports earlier and about
the other documents that were split off from the WDRs. There’s been much more of an attempt
to make research results more accessible. That’s a big change over the past 20 years.

The other thing in terms of the Bank research, which I mentioned earlier, is the amount of money
other multilateral development Banks spent on research, keeping in mind the Bank spends $25 to
$30 million. The Inter-American Development Bank spent about $2.5 million annually when I
did the work in the late ’90s. The other multilateral development banks essentially don’t spend
money on research. So in that respect, the World Bank’s research program is huge, and it not
only influences Bank operations, it influences the operational activities in all the regional
development banks because they have no research programs, by and large. So the preponderance
of the Bank and the responsibility of the Bank in development economics research are really
quite large.

ZIEGLER: An issue we’ve touched on and maybe—well, I'll ask the question anyway. The
Report on the World Bank Research Program, Fiscal 2000 and 2001 and Future Directions
[Report No. 30151, April 25, 2002] notes that while demand for Bank research has grown, Bank
funding for research declined 30 percent during the 1990s. In your view, what were the factors
accounting for this decline in funding? You did mention Preston's decision, but this obviously
goes a bit past that into more recent times.

INGRAM: The decline in research stopped pretty much at the end of the '90s, and then research
funding was level, and now my belief is that it has begun to increase a bit. I know that the
Research Support Budget, for example, was increased in size, probably around 2002. As I said,
it was a management decision, and it meant that sector research in the Bank essentially
diminished significantly.

I have to tell you an anecdote. When Michael Bruno left the Bank, he was the guest of honor at
a reception in the 12th floor of the E Building. Michael gave his comments, where he noted with
dismay that the External Affairs Department of the Bank now had a budget bigger than the
Bank’s research expenditure and that was too bad, and an allocation of resources the Bank might
want to revisit. So this was something he was quiet about up until the day he left, and he made
that comment. As I said, it was a decision that management made and . . .

ZIEGLER: And it was continued for close to a decade, I guess?




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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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INGRAM: It was not increased when Wolfensohn came in, and Wolfensohn was pushing the
knowledge bank. There was no increase in knowledge production. There was a huge increase in
the packaging of information. There was a huge emphasis on the web. The way I used to
convey this was to tell people, “What we're doing is taking chicken parts and wrapping them in
cellophane and making them look good, but we're not producing any more chickens.” And that
was a problem. We needed to acknowledge that new knowledge needed to be produced. We
couldn't just keep moving around existing knowledge like deck chairs. I had a real responsibility
to tell the Board this was happening, and I did that in the clearest possible way, and it didn't
really lead anywhere.

ZIEGLER: You have worked with all the World Bank chief economists to date. What
observations would you make concerning them? You mentioned Larry Summers, for instance,
and Anne Krueger.

INGRAM: Let me go back to Larry for a minute, who was always a constructive critic. Larry
would tell you what he thought and he would do it in a memorable way, but it was done in a way
indicating to you that things needed to be done differently, and it was fundamentally
constructive.

I think Stan Fischer was the most remarkable chief economist that I worked with. He was an
unparalleled manager. This was remarkable because he had little or no management experience.
He had never even been chairman of an academic department when he arrived at the Bank. He
made a number of innovations. I mentioned he took the front end off the WDR and produced a
new document; he established a Visiting Fellows Program; he caused the Bank to fund the
African Economic Research Consortium where the Bank entered as a charter member. I think
his changes in the two-and-a-half to three years he was here were the most lasting. And as I said,
he was a superb manager. So I thought I would give him top marks.

I didn't know Hollis all that well. Hollis came in and established the research side of the Bank
and, in particular, set up the Research Support Budget, which has also stood the test of time, but I
didn't work with Hollis all that closely.

ZIEGLER: One chief economist who's in the news—well, he's no longer chief economist, but a
gentleman who's in the news, Sir Nicholas Stern with his Stern Report—did you have any
particular views of him?

INGRAM: Most of the time that Nick was chief economist, I was in OED so I didn't work with
him all that closely. I was invited back as a member of the Research Committee and I did attend
the meetings, so I saw Nick there. I thought Nick was a safe pair of hands, as the British say
about cricket players. He was careful about what he did; he took the institution seriously; he
worked on behalf of the institution; and, he put his name on a couple of volumes, particularly
ones talking about the success of the development of enterprise. So, I think he did quite a
credible job. He came in under very difficult circumstances.




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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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ZIEGLER: Yes, I remember.

INGRAM: He came in just as Ravi Kanbur had resigned as head of the WDR. Before the WDR
was put out—this is the 2000 WDR on poverty [World Development Report 2000/2001:
Attacking Poverty. The World Bank: 2000.]—and Nick had to salvage that, and he did a
credible job.

ZIEGLER: As his brother [Richard D. Stern] also worked for the World Bank, his appointment
was quite controversial with staff, rightly or wrongly, but apparently the rules were, in the view
of some—or in the views of many staff—broken.

INGRAM: The rules were clearly broken. That's a case where I was out of touch or out of step
because I had been closely involved in chief economist selection decisions from the time of Stan
Fischer's appointment on. I had a file of candidates’ names.

I was involved enough in the selection of Nick Stern to have developed the view that Nick was
the best candidate. When you do a global review, you conclude, “This guy's available, he'd do a
good job, and he’s the best person we can bring in.” Therefore I had a tremendous amount of
sympathy with the decision that Wolfensohn made to say, “I'm going to suspend this rule.”
Now, that's partly because I've always had the view that one of the features of bureaucracies is
that any rule can be broken for cause. I thought that the cause justified breaking the rule. But
there were other people whose opinion about the world I had a lot of respect for, who took
violent exception to that. I have to tell you I was surprised because it wasn't a big deal to me, but
it was a very big deal to large numbers of people. And that surprised me.

ZIEGLER: It was unfortunate in the sense that Stern himself seems, to me at least and
obviously to you, you know, certainly a reasonable candidate, to put it mildly, somebody
who . . .

INGRAM: Absolutely. Perhaps more than other people, I had actually been through the
process of looking at the list of candidates, so I had an informed view that he was the best
candidate. My sense was that the benefit/cost analysis of breaking the rule indicated it was
worth it.

I just hadn't anticipated the extent to which other people opposed this. I think there were other
people who personalized this, and had the view that they just didn't have the clout to get the
Bank to break this rule on behalf of their relatives. They'd been telling their relatives the rule
would never be broken, suddenly it was broken, now their relatives were back saying, "Wait a
minute, if this guy can do it for his brother, why can't you do it for me?" And the whole house
came crashing down. And I just hadn’t thought that through at all.

As it turns out, Nick did a very credible job. I think people who had trouble with his
appointment would probably think he did a fine job, too.




                                           Gregory Ingram
                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                  49


ZIEGLER: You were director of the 1994 World Development Report, which examined the
link between infrastructure and development and explored ways in which developing countries
can improve both the provision and quality of infrastructure services. How did this appointment
come about?

INGRAM: I’d long been involved in urban and infrastructure issues, including transport, water,
and urban. I’d been in the departments where most of infrastructure, although not electric power
but most other aspects of infrastructure, came together, so I was interested in it. I had a
conversation with Larry Summers. I told him I would be interested in doing it. Eventually he
considered his options and decided that I was a reasonable candidate, and he appointed me.

ZIEGLER: Did you have any role in selecting the topic of infrastructure and development, or
was this—the topic already decided upon, and then you were brought in?

INGRAM: I certainly was involved in discussions where infrastructure was a candidate topic of
the WDR, and I obviously thought it was a good idea.

Going back to my comments about the strategic planning unit that laid out a sequence of WDR
topics in the late '80s, after that there was no list on the wall of the chief economist’s office of the
next five topics. Every time a discussion is launched about what the next World Development
Report topic should be, the chief economist sends out memos to Regional chief economists and
to other people in the Bank, such as the sector directors, asking, “What do you think would be a
good topic?” And of course has his own views.

There's always a set of bridesmaids. The perennial bridesmaid for the WDR is water. Every time
you send out a WDR topic memo, several people say we should do a WDR on water, and so far it
hasn't happened. But basically, there was a process like that and there was a discussion, and I
certainly thought it made sense to do infrastructure.

It particularly made sense at that time. As you recall, this was the period when foreign direct
investment in developing countries was really beginning to take off, and there was a tremendous
interest in private involvement in infrastructure. In fact, if anything, this is a topic that could
have been done a year or two earlier, but I thought it was a great idea and still do.

ZIEGLER: How did you go about selecting the team to work on the WDR?

INGRAM: That's an interesting question. What I did was talk to people whose judgment I
trusted who knew something about the area, and I asked them for suggestions. When you put
together a WDR team, you have a fixed budget, so you are interested in getting together a staff of
people whose marginal product is going to substantially exceed their wage. In the Bank, the way
you get people whose marginal product will substantially exceed their wage is to hire people
who are in lower grades, who are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, so that's what I did. And I have
to say that of the people I chose for the WDR team, I had extensive personal knowledge about
essentially none of them. For example, Lant [Hayward] Pritchett I had known because he had



                                            Gregory Ingram
                               July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
                                                50


been in DEC, but we had not worked together. I put together this team based on advice from
knowledgeable people, and it worked out quite well. My experience in the Bank is that people
know others in the Bank who are in their cohort, and they know younger people who have
worked for them or who have been in their line of control. But it’s very difficult to get to know
people outside of your cohort who are also outside of your work unit or area. And so you end up
having to go and talk to people. That’s how I put together the team.

ZIEGLER: Were there any significant controversies in drafting the WDR?

INGRAM: Oh, yes, indeed there were. I was appointed by Larry Summers as director of the
WDR, and Larry then left to join the [William J.] Clinton administration, and Michael Bruno
arrived. The WDR team started to work in July, and Michael arrived in August/September. I
believe he never was crazy about the topic. Infrastructure did not particularly interest Michael.
We also went through some challenging early drafts with the WDR, but it had a very happy
ending. It’s turned out to be, in my view—of course I'm biased about this—a very good WDR.

I have to tell you an anecdote about Michael, for whom I have a great fondness. There is a
meeting to discuss the “gray cover” at the Board. The whole Board attends the meeting and the
WDR team is sitting at the table, and Michael, who's the vice president, makes the introductions.
His introductory comments at that meeting were, "Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to know I
did not pick this topic for the WDR, and I did not pick this team. Now let me introduce Greg
Ingram, who will discuss the report." It was a breathtaking moment, I must say. But we had a
terrific discussion with the Board; and I think this WDR has done very well.

ZIEGLER: Is it worth recounting any of the controversies or were they just roughly minor in
terms of the—drafting the WDR?

INGRAM: We prepared something like five drafts of the WDR. Our early drafts weren't very
coherent, and we were basically producing a new draft every four weeks. Along about the
“yellow cover” stage, it all began to come together. But our first two drafts were pretty ragged.

Michael also said he wanted the WDR to only be a hundred pages long, and I had been planning
for more like 180 pages. We actually ended up with a WDR that was 125 pages long, yet it's also
one of the shortest ones. WDRs lately have really ballooned in size again.

This actually helped us. Consider a metaphor of the WDR as a movie. The way you make a
movie better is to take out scenes that are less interesting. I ended up with enough material I had
taken out of the WDR to produce a second WDR. For example, we did a lot of work and had
background papers written on the history of infrastructure, which is fascinating in terms of canals
and railroads, and we had several text boxes on this. With the length constraint, there's only one
box in the WDR that makes any mention of the history of infrastructure. So the rest was all left
on the cutting room floor. But, you know, if you are making the movie shorter and you're doing
it right, you're improving the movie. And that's what happened. It was a happy story at the end.




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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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ZIEGLER: The report identifies the basic cause of poor past performance in the delivery of
infrastructure services as, quote, “inadequate institutional incentives for improving the provision
of infrastructure. To promote more efficient and responsive service delivery, incentives need to
be changed through commercial management, competition, and user involvement according to
the WDR,” unquote. How was the report in general, and this conclusion in particular, received
outside the Bank?

INGRAM: I think it was received well. That was a time when there was a lot of money moving
into infrastructure and a lot of interest in private infrastructure investment. Our message was
fairly nuanced, though, relative to other people in the Bank. We placed much less emphasis on
full privatization and on private ownership as the solution. This reflected experience. We had a
box in the WDR about the telephone system in the Philippines, which has been in private hands
for 50 years. It was one of the worst performing telephone systems in the world up through the
early '90s, because it got swept up in crony capitalism.

So we were not arguing that all you had to do was privatize everything and then the world would
follow. There were people in the Bank who were making that argument, by the way, and there
were people outside the Bank making that argument. But our bumper sticker was, “Run
infrastructure like a business, not like a bureaucracy.” And that resonated.

I have to tell you the message of the WDR in '94 underlies the current Bank approach to private
involvement in infrastructure—and Michael [U.] Klein, in a number of the reports he's been
writing, or was writing a year ago at least, about private involvement with infrastructure, has
gone out of his way to acknowledge the contribution of the '94 WDR.

I have to tell you, it's had quite a good shelf life, and I was surprised at that because we were
writing at that time about BOTS (Build, Operate, and Transfer Schemes), about schemes to
encourage private involvement, and about regulatory issues, and I was under the impression the
world was changing so rapidly that in 12 months this infrastructure WDR would be completely
out of date, but that's turned out not to be true. A lot of the messages still resonate because a lot
of the private investment and privatization of infrastructure hasn't succeeded all that well. And
now people are beginning to say, “Okay, what's the halfway house look like? What's the
appropriate growth of the public sector?” The message still resonates.

ZIEGLER: You became manager of the Sector and Thematic Evaluation Division in the
Operations Evaluation Department in March 1999. What occasioned this shift from primarily
research activities?

INGRAM: First of all, I had been administrator of the Research Advisory Staff since '91, so I
had been there for eight years, albeit with one year off to do the WDR. In addition, I was finding
that management in DEC was becoming more of a challenge. It was time for a change. So one
day I got a cold call from Bob [Robert] Picciotto asking me if I would be interested in coming to
OED, and I said, “You bet.” So off I went.




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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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ZIEGLER: Not very complicated. Okay.

INGRAM: No, no, absolutely.

ZIEGLER: How did you find the work of evaluation to differ from research? I mean, clearly it
does, but evaluation does have a research component to it.

INGRAM: Absolutely right. Evaluation can be envisioned as stylized research or as focused
research. In other words, in a good evaluation you make no statement that you can’t substantiate
with evidence. It has that in common with research, but it’s more stylized—it's a little bit like
writing a sonnet. Evaluation has a set of underlying questions, which have to do with the
relevance, efficacy, and efficiency of activities. So you're always coming at the evaluation
through a particular evaluative lens, or you can think of evaluation as research that is based on
benefit/cost analysis. You can think of evaluation as essentially research looking through a
particular lens.

ZIEGLER: What were your primary responsibilities in this Sector and Thematic Evaluation
Division?

INGRAM: We were doing evaluations of sector policies and sector projects. The unit did a
large number of project completion reports, which were then building blocks for sector
evaluations. When I first got there, we were doing an evaluation of the Bank's poverty strategy
papers in countries. The other thing we were doing when I first got there was an evaluation of
the performance of agricultural projects in the Bank, and how the recently revised agricultural
policy was working.

ZIEGLER: In May of 2000, you became director of the Operations Evaluation Department.
What were the circumstances of your promotion?

INGRAM: Elizabeth McAllister had been the director of the Operations Evaluation Department
when I arrived in 1999. In May 2000, much to my surprise, she came to my office and told me
she was leaving to become director in External Affairs. I had no clue that anything like that
would happen. I then had a conversation with Bob Picciotto and he encouraged me to apply for
the job, so I did. He and I had been working together in the department and I think we made a
good team. It all made sense.

[End Tape 1, Side B]
[Begin Tape 2, Side A]

ZIEGLER: How would you characterize the relationship between the director of the Operations
Evaluation Department, which you were at that point, and the director general, Operations
Evaluation, who was Bob Picciotto at that time, as you experienced it?




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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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INGRAM: I think it was quite synergistic. I think Bob and I brought out the best in each other.
We’re very different people. And Bob as a manager can often be perceived as not being “user
friendly.” I became an intermediary between Bob and the staff. I think I was able most of the
time to meet Bob's quality standards, which were quite demanding, and to benefit from his
insight and experience, and to do that in a way that helped people do a good job. And it worked
out quite well.

As an example: when I arrived, OED had an internal review meeting for every OED report that
was going to go to the Board. When I first arrived, Bob chaired those meetings. After I became
director, we agreed that I should chair them because sometimes the meetings got off track, and it
was hard to get the meeting back on track when that happened. So I began to chair the meetings
at his suggestion, and it worked out well. Bob had a huge experience and a tremendous network
in the Bank. He also had a terrific antenna for sensing the currents in the Board. So he was just
a terrific asset for OED, but he could wear down staff. I was able to prevent the latter from
happening, and it worked out very well.

ZIEGLER: In October 2002 you became director general, Operations Evaluation. What were
the circumstances of this promotion?

INGRAM: I'm not fully apprised of the circumstances of my appointment, as you might
understand, but I believe the Board went through—or CODE [Committee on Development
Effectiveness] went through—a process identifying candidates, and I was a candidate. My belief
is that the committee became deadlocked over two candidates, neither of whom was I. As these
things sometimes happen, I then emerged as a compromise, and I was selected. But interestingly
enough, as part of this compromise I was selected for a two-year term. CODE wanted to come
back and revise its selection procedure. I had a discussion at that time with CODE's chair, who
called me in and asked if I would be interested in being acting DGO [director general,
Operations Evaluation], and I said no.

ZIEGLER: Do you recall who that was?

INGRAM: Pieter Stek. I said if I'm going to do this job, I have to be DGO, or otherwise it’s not
really appropriate. They eventually agreed. As it turned out, I served for two-and-a-half years.
They asked me to stay on longer, but at that point I had obtained another job outside of the Bank.
It was time to go, so off I went.

Another issue in this was my age. Had they appointed me for a five-year term, originally it
would have taken me beyond the mandatory retirement age of 62, which is sometimes enforced
and sometimes not enforced.

ZIEGLER: Another one of those bureaucratic rules.

INGRAM: That's right.




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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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ZIEGLER: From the mid-1990s onward, OED went through a renewal process. What were the
factors that impelled OED to undergo this renewal process, and from where did the initiative to
undertake this renewal process come?

INGRAM: I was not in OED when this happened, but my understanding is that OED was under
a lot of pressure from Wolfensohn. Wolfensohn came over to OED one day and famously said,
"I do not need a history department." He meant he did not need a department spending $20
million a year to tell him what the Bank had done in the past. Bob Picciotto thought that it was
worth rethinking what OED would do, so he launched a reorganization.

Elizabeth McAllister was then director of OED, and this reorganization played to her strengths.
She was very good at thinking about mission statements and vision statements and strategies and
organigrams. So actually, she made a big contribution to the exercise. It was highly
participatory, too.

I arrived after the dust was beginning to settle and most new staff were in place. So I missed the
excitement of the renewal process.

ZIEGLER: Did you have the sense that Wolfensohn’s criticism had at least some justification?
Admittedly you came in somewhat later, but you would have heard the echoes.

INGRAM: I think the changes that were made in OED—which I think were good changes—
were probably not changes that Wolfensohn might have had in mind. I think the renewal of
OED was a good thing. Wolfensohn played a role in getting it started, but where it ended up was
likely a very different place than where he would have thought it might have ended up, to the
extent that he had any thoughts about that.

ZIEGLER: As you noted in your remarks at the 30th anniversary celebration of OED, the
renewal of OED involved three major dimensions: one, moving evaluation from the project
level to higher levels of aggregation at the sector, country, and global level; two, opening up the
evaluation process and making the procedures more transparent, adopting a presumption of
disclosure for OED's evaluation products; and three, reaching beyond the Bank to the wider
evaluation community. Please discuss your involvement with regard to these three major
dimensions that changed during your period in OED.

INGRAM: In terms of moving to higher levels of aggregation, when I arrived OED had been
carrying out country assistance evaluations. Ruben Lamdany, who was head of the division in
OED that did country analysis [Country Evaluations and Regional Relations Division], started
these. They did some small ones and some large ones. The small ones were called country
assistance notes, and we soon stopped doing those and just did full-blown country evaluations.

When I first arrived, I worked a lot on large sector evaluations, looking at the water sector,
telecommunications, forest policy, and health policy. These evaluated how sectors were
performing, and also included evaluations of major Bank policies. Examples of the latter



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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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included the Bank’s policy to highly-indebted poor countries, that is, the HIPC initiative. We
also did a big review of IDA [International Development Association] X, XI, and XII—nine
years of IDA. We did a review of global programs, and we did a review of the so-called
knowledge bank. So we were doing not just sectoral evaluations but also large-scale policy
evaluations.

On the disclosure side, the ironic thing with respect to evaluation is that every new product line
OED started, like country assistance evaluations, always was disclosed from the beginning. The
original OED products, which are the project completion reports, which were started by Mervyn
[L.] Weiner long ago, were not disclosed. This shows the influence of the dead hand of
history—the last OED product to be disclosed was the first OED product to be produced. We
agreed, and then got the Board to agree to disclose these project completion reports not long
before I left. All of the new evaluation products were disclosed from their origin, but it took 33
years to disclose the project completion reports.

ZIEGLER: This is very much parallel with the Archives, because an outside researcher can see
much more recent material much more easily than material going back to some of the early loans
which are 30, 40, 50 years old.

INGRAM: Exactly. I think there's a rule that says if it's more than X years, it's relatively easy
to see, as I recall, but there has been a dark zone where you couldn't get to them.

In terms of linking to other units, Bob in particular had initiated contacts and representation of
OED with—in fact, he’d helped to set up—the Evaluation Cooperation Group, whose members
are the evaluation units in all of the multilateral development banks. There is an annual meeting
of this group.

ZIEGLER: Do they all pretty much have them, I mean, the multilateral banks?

INGRAM: They do now. In the last five years, whatever evaluation units they had have
become independent of management. So you now have an independent evaluation unit in the
IDB [Inter-American Development Bank], in the Asian Development Bank, and EBRD
[European Bank for Reconstruction and Development] is a little bit less independent, and, I
think, the Caribbean Development Bank. So now these independent evaluation groups get
together.

There are also annual meetings of the evaluation units from all the bilateral donors. The DAC
[Development Co-operation Directorate of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development] runs an evaluation network, and OED had observer status there. OED was the
oldest independent evaluation unit in all these institutions, and we provide a fair amount of
intellectual leadership to the evaluation community. I was active in those meetings, but Bob had
certainly played an important role in establishing this Evaluation Cooperation Group of the
MDBs [multilateral development banks].




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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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ZIEGLER: I would like to follow up on something we just touched on a moment ago. For
many years, the World Bank has been extremely reluctant to allow public scrutiny of its records
and reports, and there’s a continuing evolution in this matter. Did the adoption of a policy of
presumption of disclosure that we’ve talked about before encounter resistance in some quarters?

INGRAM: Not so much for the new products. As I said, there was really an issue with these
project completion reports.

At the same time, evaluation is a little different. It’s difficult to make the argument that the Bank
has an independent evaluation unit which produces reports that go directly to the Board,
independent of management, but are secret. If you’re going to have an evaluation mechanism
like this that reports to the Board to help the Board do its job, it’s very difficult to argue that these
documents should not be disclosed. In fact, you can argue that for the whole process to have
credibility, they have to be disclosed. A different set of arguments applies to negotiations with
countries about loans. But with evaluation, it’s really difficult to argue that you have a credible
evaluation program if nobody can come in and verify it in any way. It’s very difficult to get up
and make a speech arguing that point.

ZIEGLER: Has anybody made the argument that the World Bank ultimately deals with public
funds that are put up by the taxpayers of the countries, and thus there’s a degree of accountability
clearly implied in its use of those funds?

INGRAM: Yes indeed. There’s a sense in which the existence of OED is a response to that
claim, which may actually have potentially slowed down the disclosure of other documents
because, after all, you say, "Well, I don’t have to disclose these documents, because I have
independent evaluators doing it." Now, I don’t know if that’s true or not, but the argument you’re
stating certainly has been made. On the other hand, the argument is also made that you cannot
do business effectively under a streetlight. And, you know, the Bank goes back and forth on this.

I have to say one other thing about the presumption of disclosure for evaluations. The actual
rules for disclosing evaluation documents are that the documents will be disclosed unless the
Board decides not to disclose them. When I was director general, my view was it would be a bad
day when I produced a report and put my signature on it and the Board decided it couldn’t be
disclosed. That was something to avoid. Of course, if there were such a document that the
Board decided not to disclose, that document would be on every web site in the world in the next
24 hours, receiving much more attention than it would otherwise. In the world we live in now,
having a doctrine to not disclose things is a fool’s errand because copies are out there, and pretty
soon they’re on somebody’s blog or web site. Keeping documents secret is a very difficult thing
to do in the Bank. If the Board decides not to disclose an evaluation, that would be a really
significant event suggesting that somewhere somebody has failed.

That having been said, I have sat in more than one Board meeting, where members of CODE
have said, "Oh, boy, should we really disclose this review we did of IDA 10, 11, and 12?” Or,
“The press is going to pick this up and it's going to be very difficult for us.” I say, “Well, you



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know, selective quotation by the press is a fact of life, and you’ve got to learn to live with it.”
But in fact, at the end of the day, for every document I was involved in, people would make such
statements, but we would disclose them.

ZIEGLER: How would you describe your relations as DGO with the Board of Executive
Directors and, in particular, with its Committee on Development Effectiveness?

INGRAM: There's a sense in which one's relationship or one's standing with the Board or from
CODE is as good as one’s last report. They want high quality documents, and OED has to
deliver them. Pieter Stek had been chairman of CODE. When I became DGO, he was there for
several months, and then stepped down. I got along very well with Pieter, who had a well-
organized office and ran meetings well. His successor was Chander [Mohan] Vasudev, Indian
ED [Executive Director], who had a different style, a bit more out of the Indian Administrative
Service. But he also ran a good meeting, and he got CODE through some very difficult
evaluation experiences, the most notable of which dealt with large dams.

ZIEGLER: It was very controversial, I know.

INGRAM: It was additionally controversial because there was a parallel evaluation being
carried out, and it became very awkward. But he actually turned out to be very adept at charting
a course through that.

Board members have very different perspectives, but there's a sense in which the countries that
provide development assistance have a different interest in evaluation from the countries that are
receiving the development assistance. And that shows up from time to time in CODE. You
know, there is a Part I/Part II caricature of their interest in evaluation. I certainly was aware of
that from time to time.

ZIEGLER: How would you describe the trend in OED's relations with staff elsewhere in the
Bank, most particularly, of course, in operations during your time in OED?

INGRAM: I think there was some improvement. We were dealing largely with a central
operations unit run by Jim [James W.] Adams for most of the time I was there. When I first
came to OED Joanne Salop ran it. Joanne then hired John [M.] Underwood to come in, and take
charge of interactions with OED, and John and I communicated extremely well. We had no
serious misunderstandings. Jim Adams then came in, and we all respected each other.

The critical thing for OED is to produce quality work where the conclusions trace back to the
evidence. And when we review documents within OED, that's a key question. But basically, if
OED produces quality work, people in operations grit their teeth—grind their teeth a bit and then
they say, “Well, there's something here that we need to take seriously.” And Jim was very good
about that.




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I just talked specifically about that unit, but in general in the Bank, you have to produce high
quality work, and although Bank staff may be unhappy for a while, they’ll see that there’s
something to the evaluation. The evaluations we have the most trouble with are evaluations that
become personalized—where somebody on the operations side develops the view that somehow
they're being evaluated personally. Interestingly enough, the evaluations that were most prone to
that, in my experience, were country assistance evaluations looking at a country program that
had the same country director for four or five of those last five years. Those country directors
would tend to have the view that they were being personally evaluated. One can understand that.
On the other hand, if you had a new country director who just arrived and you were evaluating
performance in the last five years, the new country director would say, “This is great. I'll
welcome it. I'll see what I can learn, and it will be terrific.”

Interestingly enough, on the sector side, if you're doing an evaluation of the Bank's water policy
or the Bank's agricultural policy or whatever, sector policies in the Bank are much less
personalized. It's rare to come to a sector and think of the sector policy as being embodied in a
single staff person in the Bank, whereas with a country program such personalization is common.
If you're the country director of Transylvania and I'm coming in to review Transylvania, where
you’ve been for the last five years, it's very easy to see how you might take this personally. But
what is interesting on the sector side is there are very few cases where there's an individual who's
a focal point for sector policy. Sector policy is much more diffused among the staff than country
programs are. But on rare occasions we would run into a problem on the sector side as well. By
and large we had our largest problems where people personalized what we were saying.

ZIEGLER: By what mechanisms were the assessments provided by OED reports taken on
board institutionally and incorporated into Bank operations?

INGRAM: Good question. Every OED evaluation has a set of recommendations, usually three
or four recommendations. When the OED evaluation goes to CODE—and the OED evaluation,
by the way, goes to CODE in final form; OED does not negotiate language in evaluations with
Board members—at the time that the final evaluation goes to CODE, management sends a draft
management response. And the draft management response, in addition to discussing the
evaluation, also responds to the recommendations.

There's a specific format. The recommendations are in a table in the back of the evaluation, and
the left-hand column has OED's recommendations, and the right-hand column has management's
response. So management can respond and say that's a good recommendation, we will
implement it; or they can say management disagrees with it, or won't implement it for a variety
of reasons.

So management undertakes to implement, to do something, or to do nothing in response to these
OED evaluations. This is all published, including the management response.

Then, once a year a document is prepared that reviews all of the outstanding recommendations
and reports on what has been done. That report is sent to CODE, and then CODE goes over that



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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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document and can say to management, “We see that this recommendation was made two years
ago and nothing's happened yet. When are you going to do something about it?” There's an
accountability system that's built in with the recommendations. So that's essentially the
mechanism for getting management to take action.

ZIEGLER: If the management says, “No, that's not a good recommendation; we're not going to
do anything,” is that where it stays then at that point, or can CODE come back and say, “Well,
you guys have got to do it anyway” sort of thing?

INGRAM: Yes, CODE can come back and say, “We've had this discussion where everybody in
the room has thought something should be done about this. We suggest management revises its
management response.” And so then management goes off and revises the management
response. The CODE chairman does not direct management to write down as its management
response what he or she dictates, but will say, “You've heard this discussion; now go back and be
responsive.” And they are.

ZIEGLER: Although as a measure of its independence OED reports directly to the Board of
Executive Directors rather than to the president of the World Bank there are some who say that
what is now the Independent Evaluation Group is still not sufficiently independent, and that
undue pressure can still be exerted in various ways. At least some of these critics believe that
qualified persons not otherwise employed by the Bank should perform the evaluation function.
How would you respond?

INGRAM: This is a long-standing discussion and raises the question, what sort of knowledge
does one need to bring to evaluation to be credible, and not just credible with people outside the
Bank but credible with people inside the Bank? So I think one needs some special knowledge of
the institution or of how the institution works and that, I think, improves evaluations.

In terms of pressure, note that independence from management is embodied in the DGO. The
DGO signs every document that goes to the Board and has to defend every document that goes to
the Board. Then at the end of the DGO’s term appointment, he or she leaves the Bank and can
never be hired in any other capacity. So the independence rests with the DGO.

The discussions that I had with management about evaluations were always about substance.
The comments were, “Well, we disagree with this method. We're not so sure your sample size is
adequate,” or whatever it happened to be. Nobody ever made threats. That was never an issue,
in my experience.

Now, OED staff that work in OED for a while and want to go back to work in operations may
indeed say, “I have to be careful because I may reduce my prospects in employment in
operations.” It falls to the DGO to root that out and prevent that from happening, so it's a hard
job.




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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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There was a proposal made about 15 years ago, I believe by an outside commission, to set up an
outside agency that would evaluate all the MDBs. This comes around from time to time. I think
that the question then is who’s the client for that evaluation unit. This would be a completely
separate organization. It’s hard to believe that the client would be the Board because within the
Bank environment, Board members represent shareholders. And informing the Board members,
it seems to me is a useful thing that can affect the organization. If you had an outside agency,
would they come in and address their report to the Board, or would they address their reports to
the press? Exactly how would that work? The bureaucratic incentives are not entirely clear to
me. I think people need to think through the details of that.

I’m aware that the Center for Global Development, for example, has been advocating
independent evaluations. They’ve also been advocating randomized experiments—by the way,
feel free to ask me a question about that. But I think that a separate evaluation group could
easily turn into an organization that would start evaluating its effectiveness based on its press
coverage. And if you really want to influence the institutions, that would not work well. I'd like
to see more detailed plans about how exactly that would work before I decided it was a good
idea.

ZIEGLER: Did you want to say more about that randomized sort of evaluation?

INGRAM: Yeah, there has been a . .

ZIEGLER: It rings a bell with me. I have heard of that . . .

INGRAM: . . tremendous enthusiasm for doing randomized experiments to find out what works
in development. And this has been advanced as a kind of silver bullet that will solve the
evaluation problems. There are a couple of issues there. Randomized experiments are typically
carried out on individuals, on small institutions, or small enterprises. When you look at the
evaluation problems we face in development, the really tough issues we face are where we're
applying policies at the national level. Aspects of structural adjustment, for example, come to
mind. And it turns out nobody is suggesting that we are going to carry out randomized
experiments at high levels of aggregation, such as on countries, and this relates to the point about
trying to move OED's evaluation to higher levels of aggregation. You're not going to carry out
randomized experiments across countries. So I think randomized experiments work well on
relatively small-scale problems where, by the way, we have lots of other evaluation tools that
work pretty well. So the first problem is that randomized experiments can't be used to deal with
what are currently the really tough issues that we face. Suppose I tell you that it's important to
have an independent central bank. Well, we're not going to run randomized experiments across
central banks.

The second issue with randomized experiments is transferability of results. Everybody invokes
medical experience here and talks about drug trials. If you are testing a drug or a policy where
the response is in some sense mechanistic or biologically determined, and you believe all the
other mechanisms in the world are like the ones you are testing, then results will be transferable.



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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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For example, if your sample of 50 white males respond to low doses of aspirin by having fewer
heart attacks, you conclude, “Well, this will work for all other people”. One of the things we've
learned about randomized drug trials is that most of them are carried on men, and we now know
that women often react differently. The point that I'm trying to make is the argument for
randomized experiments rests on the assumption that the results are transferable. Now, a lot of
development interventions have as determinants of outcomes not just mechanistic or biological
mechanisms, but also institutional structures, and the institutional structures differ across
countries.

Let me give you an example, an anecdote. We did a very expensive, not a randomized
experiment, but a very expensive and very complete statistical analysis of four primary education
projects in Ghana that were implemented in the late '80s. These were traditional “bricks and
mortar” projects. We had an earlier LSMS [Living Standards Measurement Study] survey in
Ghana. We went back and carried out the same survey, went back to the same schools,
interviewed the same people in the same schools, and we concluded that these four projects in
Ghana had been extremely successful. Literacy rates went up, school attendance went up. The
projects worked. Question: If you did the same projects again in Ghana, would they have the
same result? Answer: We don't know. Question: If you did the same projects in the country
next door, would they have the same results? Answer: We don't know.

The point I'm trying to make is if the results aren't very transferable, then the notion that
randomized experiments are going to produce generalizable results is wrong. The people
pushing these projects, this particular technique, need to be more honest about that than they
have been.

The fact is that many development outcomes have institutional variables as determinants. And
as you move across countries, those institutional variables change. And so it's really an issue.
And this insight is embodied, by the way, these days in the notion of country-specific
interventions. I think there's still a place for randomized experiments, but understand that you
may learn whether things work or not in this country in this decade, and it may tell you nothing
about next decade or the country next door. And so there needs to be more truth in disclosure
about this.

ZIEGLER: What was the most challenging part of your job as DGO?

INGRAM: Well, first of all there was a CODE meeting every two weeks. Moreover, I was
DGO not just of the Bank, but also for IFC [International Finance Corporation], and MIGA
[Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency]. Across the three institutions I was sending 24
major reports a year to CODE for discussion, which is basically one every two weeks. And at a
CODE meeting the DGO and evaluation team is essentially taking an oral exam on the
evaluation. The DGO has to be on top of it, have read the reports, and be willing to vouch for
and defend what's in the reports. I would essentially examine a staff member on the report to the
point that I was satisfied, and then I would proceed to stand shoulder to shoulder with the staff
member at CODE. I didn't think it was appropriate at a CODE meeting to turn to the evaluation



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                             July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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staff and say, "Well, Mr. Ziegler, why did you write that paragraph on page 16?" My view was
if there’s a controversial paragraph on page 16, I better understand it and be willing to defend it.
That was my conception of the job. So the whole business of meeting with CODE involved a lot
of preparation.

The second challenge was dealing with the press because one would like to have more press
coverage for OED. The thing that always worried me about press coverage of evaluation reports
was that I would get ahead of the Board, and I thought it would be very dangerous if Board
members or CODE members developed the view that the DGO was trying to use the press to
influence the Board. So I was very, very concerned about talking to the press. Because what the
press, of course, is interested in is controversy. They’re particularly interested in reports critical
of the Bank. That was a really difficult challenge that I never fully resolved.

The final thing is related to the first point and it’s quality control. When you strike an OED
product, it’s got to ring like a bell and it’s a big challenge to keep that up all year long.

[End Tape 2, Side A]
[Begin Tape 2, Side B]

ZIEGLER: Well, Greg, we’re coming to the end of this interview and we’re going to indulge in
some summary reflections. To begin with, what were the most important lessons learned, both
from a personal institutional point of view, during your career in the World Bank?

INGRAM: I’ve had difficulty coming up with a satisfactory answer to this. But picking up on
my last comment, a high-quality product is really the key to happiness in the institution. If you
are producing quality products, at the end of the day everything will work out reasonably well.

In addition, the quality of the staff is absolutely critical because in the institution it’s extremely
expensive to correct personnel mistakes. For example, when I was director of the Development
Research Department, I spent about half my time on recruitment. I would always bring people in
to give a seminar and make an oral presentation. I think that was a sensible allocation of effort.
In those 48 months that I was director of DRD I hired 50 people. So it was really a busy time.

The other thing is related to the ethos of the one-minute manager. It’s really important to give
people credit for what they do. That’s something I had learned full well by the time I got to
OED, and I think staff were quite appreciative of that.

And the final comment is the necessity and risk of press coverage. In that regard, the best one-
day training program I ever took at the Bank was media relations. It really helped me a great
deal. But it’s essentially people and product and credit.

ZIEGLER: Who provided that particular training module?




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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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INGRAM: No. All WDR teams, at least when I was on the WDR, did this. It was an outside
consulting firm who provided this service. It’s expensive, but it’s just fantastic.

ZIEGLER: What were the most notable internal trends in the World Bank as they evolved
during the course of your career, from your perception?

INGRAM: When I came to the Bank, the project director was king in operations. And when I
left the Bank, the country director was king. It was a big move from a sectoral and project focus
in the Bank to a country focus, so that’s one significant trend. I want to come back and comment
on that in a minute.

The second big change in the Bank was the geographic decentralization of the Bank, moving
staff overseas.

ZIEGLER: Do you think that was a good idea?

INGRAM: I think it’s unclear if it’s for good or ill. When I was in OED I attended several
meetings, operational meetings, with people reporting on what the effects of decentralization
were, and management had very little idea. What everybody falls back on is that the country
clients say they like it—but this is all anecdotal.

When I first learned about decentralization, my view was—particularly when they were going to
hire local staff at lower salaries—my view was, “Ah, we're following the Nike strategy. We're
moving production overseas to take advantage of the lower labor costs.” One measure of
success, therefore, would be cost savings, but we all know that decentralization has produced no
cost savings. So if that was the motivation, which I don't think it was, it failed. I mean, what
we're left with is an evolving personnel conundrum where you've got a different pension
program in every country; and you've got people sitting in adjacent offices doing relatively
similar things but earning very different salaries, which have produced lots of unhappiness and
tension in these offices. Whether the benefits of better country relations are there or not, I don't
know. One would expect improvements in project implementation because you can have all
your project staff out there supervising things.

A third thing that's happened in the Bank is the centralization of research in DEC. Originally,
there was a lot of research carried out in the central sector departments. Now, DEC does roughly
three-quarters of the research in the Bank.

A fourth thing we talked a bit about in the earlier discussion is the erosion of operational skills—
technical skills in operations, and I suggested that had to do with the organizational structure of
the Bank.

Let me come back to the business of country focus, because one of the arguments for having a
country director put together a country program is the notion that the country director will have a
country program that is integrated and coherent and faithfully reflects the country’s priorities,



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whereas in the past you had a country program which reflected the cumulative results of different
sectoral people going out with stronger or weaker sales skills who would convince different
ministries that certain projects made sense. In other words, what you had was a bunch of
sectoral salesmen going around peddling things on a decentralized basis, and the country
program was the sum of what the peddlers had sold. Now you have this hypothesized integrated
and coherent view.

And the interesting question is: Is the country director providing a faithful and objective view of
what the country needs, or is the country director providing the country director’s view of what
the country needs? And the test of that, which has yet to be done to any great extent, is how
much do operational programs change when country directors change? If there are big changes
in country programs when country directors change, that’s consistent with the hypothesis that the
country director is a determinant. And if they don’t change very much, then that suggests that the
country director is a transparent lens that transmits the country’s situation faithfully. I don't
know of any sort of systematic evidence on this, but it's certainly the case that a number of
country programs have changed a lot when country directors have changed, suggesting you're
getting an individual's interpretation of what the country needs, and not some kind of faithful
rendering of what the country needs. And I'd be a little nervous about that. But that's something
that management needs to look at.

ZIEGLER: What did you like most about your career in the World Bank and what did you like
least?

INGRAM: I think I'm similar to other people who have left the Bank, in that I had terrific
colleagues in the institution and really interesting work.

Also, it's really gratifying to think that what one is doing can actually improve the lives of other
people in the world who are suffering.

A third thing that's interesting about a career in the Bank is that you really get to look at global
evidence about issues, not just evidence from a particular country. The terrific advantage that
the Bank has relative to other regional institutions is the Bank’s global perspective, and it's just
terrifically gratifying to have all that at your fingertips.

The thing I like least about my career at the Bank? Before I came to the Bank I had been doing
research at a university, and I was well aware of the big disconnect between research and policy.
When I was at Harvard, I was doing research for the U.S. Department of Transportation, and the
Department of Transportation is an impenetrable bureaucracy that somehow has a hard time
utilizing its research. And I said, “Boy, the wonderful thing about coming to the Bank is that the
barriers between research and policy will disappear. Here's an institution that is going to be able
to take account of the externalities and really have a terrific handshake between research and
operations.” I was in the Bank for a few days and discovered the vocabulary of “us and them.”
It pretty quickly became clear "us" were the people in research and "them" was everybody else.
This, of course, continues up to the present day, but it's remarkable the extent to which there is



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                              July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited
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continuing bifurcation in an institution which ought to be able to make that bifurcation go away.
And it hasn’t, and that’s an interesting fact and a disappointment.

The other interesting thing about the Bank is its engagement in what I call the systematic
destruction of human capital. That is, you get people to the point where they understand a
country and then you move them. I wonder if that’s always the best way to do things. That’s not
so much something I don’t like, but it’s something I observe and question.

ZIEGLER: And finally, what do you consider to have been your greatest success, and what
would you have liked to have done better?

INGRAM: In my Bank career the 1994 World Development Report stands out. I think most
WDR directors probably think their WDR was the most satisfying thing they did at the Bank.
And that was true for me.

A close second is being DGO, which is a position the significance of which I have only come to
appreciate after leaving the Bank. I look back and say it’s amazing that an institution like the
Bank has an organization like OED, now Independent Evaluation [Group]. Being DGO was an
amazing privilege. Those are my two most significant things.

What would I have liked to have done better? I would have liked to have done a better job as
director of the Development Research Department. I took that job when I was 39. I had a lot to
learn, and I learned a lot in that job. If I could replay those four years, it might be a bit different,
although there were lots of challenging constraints at that time. I wish I had done that better than
I think I did.

ZIEGLER: Well, Greg, this has been very interesting to listen to your reflections on your career
in the Bank. On behalf of the World Bank World Group Oral History Program, I thank you very
much for your participation.

[End Tape 2, Side B]
[End of interview]




                                            Gregory Ingram
                               July 7 and November 20, 2006—Final Edited