For instance, many of the “shovel-ready” projects in poor countries that the bank had intended to support in future years could be brought forward to this year. Nancy Birdsall of the Centre for Global Development, a Washington think-tank, believes that the bank should also temporarily suspend internal rules that prevent loans being disbursed quickly.

Even if that were to happen, plenty of problems lie ahead. The world’s poorest countries rely mainly on interest-free loans or grants made through the International Development Association (IDA), an arm of the bank. IDA’s funds are replenished every three years, and the latest round of commitments worth $41 billion, made in December 2007, determine its ability to lend until mid-2011. But America’s promised contribution of $3.7 billion has yet to be approved by Congress. Getting this through may just have become trickier: the bank’s Independent Evaluation Group recently found an “important weakness...in the complex of controls to manage the risk of fraud and corruption in operations supported by IDA”. Yet another potential blow to the poor.

© The Economist Newspaper Limited 2009