An institution created with the IMF at Bretton Woods in 1944 and opened in 1946. The World Bank has three main branches: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the International Development Agency (IDA) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Collectively, it aims to promote economic development in the world’s poorer countries through advice and long-term lending, averaging $30 ¬billion a year, spread around 100 countries. Critics of the World Bank say that it often worsens the problems facing developing countries. Its advice has often been guided by economic fashion, which led it to support a centrally planned brand of development economics in the 1960s and 1970s, before switching to privatization and structural adjustment in the 1980s and then to promoting democracy and economic transparency, and attacking crony capitalism, in the late 1990s. Until recently, it has generally supported big, ¬high-profile projects rather than more economically useful smaller schemes. It has often failed to ensure that its loans have been spent on the intended project. Its willingness to pump money into struggling countries creates a potential moral hazard, in which politicians may have little incentive to govern well because they believe that, if they do a bad job, the World Bank will come to the rescue. The increase in private-sector lending to and investment in emerging markets has led to growing discussion of whether the World Bank is any longer needed.