There is a tremendous predisposition within the Bank to push the money. The borrowing government wants the project. The Bank says 'what the hell, we're never going to lose, we are always going to be repaid'. There's very little attention paid to whether in five or ten years down the road the project will prove to be successful. It's a kind of culture biased to project approval.
Nobody has an interest in stopping it.
I suppose the larger the project the better. The evaluation would be a lot more difficult for a lot of small projects than for one big one. The costs of monitoring and lending are the same for a big project as for a small. As someone put it 'Efficiency in the Bank is to move the greatest amount of money with the least amount of thought'. On this fiftieth anniversary of Bretton Woods the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq has advocated a return to Keynes' original vision.