To begin with, we will give a brief introduction about two ancient international institutions, the World Bank Group (WBG) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were founded at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 and have two complementary missions,while the World Bank Group works with developing countries to reduce poverty and promote shared prosperity, the IMF works to stabilize the International Monetary System and monitor the movement of currencies in the world.
اضافة اعلان
The World Bank Group provides financing, policy advice and technical assistance to governments and focuses on strengthening the private sector in developing countries. The IMF monitors the economy at the global level and in member countries, provides loans to countries facing balance of payments problems, provides practical assistance to member countries, countries must first join the fund in order to qualify for membership in the Bank Group; today the number of members of each of them is 189 member countries, and the World Bank has financed more than 15 thousand development projects by providing conventional loans, in order to direct cooperation with countries to eradicate poverty and promote prosperity on a livable planet, so the World Bank focuses on five areas of development, namely: human, prosperity, planet, infrastructure and digitization.
This bank also considers the impact of his work on issues of gender, fragility, conflict and violence in these areas. Interest-free credits, grants.
After this introductory introduction, part of which I have quoted from their website, I will refer to the recent World Bank Report Part One:" macroeconomic prospects" within the Economic Observatory for the Middle East and North Africa /April 2025.
In the first part of the report, World Bank economists ' estimates show that the Middle East and North Africa region achieved a modest growth of 1.9% in 2024, and economic growth is expected to rise moderately to 2.6% in 2025.
For oil-exporting countries, the recovery of growth is associated with a planned rollback of oil production cuts. For oil-importing countries, growth is expected to pick up thanks to the strength of private consumption as inflation falls and the agricultural sector recovers in some economies. Despite these positive forecasts, the future prospects of the region are still shrouded in a great deal of uncertainty.
The conflict has led to a decline in development throughout the region, and its effects will remain for a long time, exacerbating a history of chronically low growth,the first part deals with the situation of fragile and conflict-affected countries, where the prospects for peace and recovery remain precarious.
Through this World Bank report and previous reports, we conclude that the Middle East is the most region in the world exposed to wars and conflicts at the regional level over the past four decades due to the geographical location linking the three continents Asia, Africa and Europe, and the impact of geopolitical conflicts on the countries of the Middle East affected the economies of these countries and their development plans and economic vision that they have drawn, and and not only that, logistics transportation costs have increased For example, Jordan has been greatly affected by Israel's wars on Gaza and Lebanon over the past two decades and its recent war on Iran and the resulting closures of air, sea and land ports, Jordan has also been affected by the closure of the borders with Iraq for many years as a result of the US war on it, as well as the borders with Syria as a result of internal conflicts, not to mention Jordan's reception of refugees from those countries as a result of the instability caused by the Arab Spring damage and complications.
All this has caused additional financial burdens on Jordan's budget during the decades of conflict and an increase in the cost of living, which prompted it to turn to those two seasons.
The message of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is to have a new policy within a risk plan with the preference of supporting countries affected by these conflicts, especially if they are the result of errors and failures in International estimates by triggering these crises and wars, to be supported either in supporting their budgets directly to achieve their goals that are in line with the policies of the World Bank and the International Fund, or partial debt forgiveness, or even allowing interest on loans during conflicts to achieve economic damage, in addition to an increase in support for development projects that aim to improve the level of poverty and unemployment, because they are directly proportional to those conflicts and events in the region.
The stability of the Middle Eastern countries and their economic blocking is a necessity for the implementation of any global projects linking the East with the West in light of competition between two poles headed by the United States and China, the new legislation of these two institutions should include a new assessment of the procedures for dealing with countries that are exposed to the influence of geopolitical disputes, especially that most of the Middle Eastern countries are under the umbrella of the Western pole supporting these two institutions, and that there is a new competition on the horizon at the other pole, led by China through the BRICS group, with the so-called Development Bank, which seems to have understood the countries suffering from the strict laws of these two institutions in collecting borrowing funds, and from the devaluation of countries, as happened with Egypt The New Development Bank is a multilateral development bank established by the founding countries of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) with the aim of mobilizing resources for infrastructure projects and sustainable development in emerging markets and developing countries.
Therefore, it has become imperative for the two Western institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to review and amend their policies, especially in the area of geopolitical tensions, to achieve their goals and not to alienate allies from borrowing countries .
