Tuesday, March 31, 2015

"Bankspeak: The Language of World Bank Reports, 1946–2012"

Stanford University's Literary Lab presents Pamphlet 9:
 Franco Moretti
Dominique Pestre
What can quantitative linguistic analysis tell us about the operations and outlook of the international financial institutions? At first glance, the words most frequently used in the World Bank’s Annual Reports give an impression of unbroken continuity. [1] Seven are near the top at any given time: three nouns—bank, loan/s,development—and four adjectives: fiscal, economic, financial, private. This septet is joined by a handful of other nouns: ibrd, countries, investment/s, interest, programme/s, project/s, assistance, and—though initially less frequent—lending, growth, cost, debt, trade, prices. There is also a second, more colourless set of adjectives—other, new, such, net, first, more, general—plus agricultural, partly replaced from the 1990s by rural. [2] The message is clear: the World Bank lends money for the purpose of stimulating development, notably in the rural South, and is therefore involved with loans, investments and debts. It works through programmes and projects, and considers trade a key resource for economic growth. Being concerned with development, the Bank deals with all sorts of economic, financial and fiscal matters, and is in touch with private business. All quite simple, and perfectly straightforward.
And yet, behind this façade of uniformity, a major metamorphosis has taken place. Here is how the Bank’s Report described the world in 1958:
The Congo’s present transport system is geared mainly to the export trade, and is based on river navigation and on railroads which lead from river ports into regions producing minerals and agricultural commodities. Most of the roads radiate short distances from cities, providing farm-to-market communications. In recent years road traffic has increased rapidly with the growth of the internal market and the improvement of farming methods.
And here is the Report from half a century later, in 2008:
Levelling the playing field on global issues
Countries in the region are emerging as key players on issues of global concern, and the Bank’s role has been to support their efforts by partnering through innovative platforms for an enlightened dialogue and action on the ground, as well as by supporting South–South cooperation.
It’s almost another language, in both semantics and grammar. The key discontinuity, as we shall see, falls mostly between the first three decades and the last two, the turn of the 1990s, when the style of the Reports becomes much more codified, self-referential and detached from everyday language. It is this Bankspeak that will be the protagonist of the pages that follow.

i. semantic transformations
Nouns are at the centre of World Bank Reports. During the first two decades, 1950–70, the most frequent among them can be grouped in two main clusters. The first, obviously enough, encompasses the economic activities of the Bank: loan/s, development, power (in the sense of electricity), programme, projects, investment, equipment, production, construction, plant; further down the list are companies, facilities, industry, machineries, followed by a string of concrete terms like port, road, steel, irrigation, kWh, river, highway, railway—and then timber, pulp, coal, iron, steam, steel, locomotives, diesel, freight, dams, bridges, cement, chemical, acres, hectares, drainage, crop, cattle, livestock. All quite appropriate for a bank which offers loans and investments (the only explicitly financial terms in this long list) to promote a variety of infrastructural development projects. [3] 

The second noun cluster is much smaller (just a dozen words), and describes how the Bank actually operates. Confronted with existing demands, its experts analyse numbers, but they also pay visits, realize surveys and conduct missions in the field; the classic ingredients of a scientific approach to a complex situation, which requires the active presence of experts to collect and elaborate the data. Afterwards, the Bank proceeds to advise countries, suggest solutions, assist local governments and allocate its loans. Rhetorically, investment programmes are defined by the needs of the local economy, according to the basic idea that investment in infrastructure will lead to economic development and social well-being. At the end of every cycle, the Bank specifies what has been lent, spent, paid and sold, and describes the equipment—dams, factory, irrigation systems—that has been put into operation. A clear link is established between empirical knowledge, money flows and industrial constructions: knowledge is associated with physical presence in situ, and with calculations conducted in the Bank’s headquarters; money flows involve the negotiation of loans and investments with individual states; and the construction of ports, energy plants, etc., is the result of the whole process. In this eminently temporal sequence, a strong sense of causality links expertise, loans, investments, and material realizations....MUCH MORE (25 page PDF
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