Government and Politics Issues

A Third World City On The Potomac

Noting that Washington, D.C., shares many of the same problems encountered in Third World countries, the World Bank is offering its help. While it can't make loans to industrialized countries, it has volunteered its staff of economists, engineers, doctors, teachers and other specialists, as well as more than $1 million in project grants and services over the next 10 months.

These resources will be used to attack such problems as high rates of unemployment, crumbling infrastructure and "an unfriendly business environment."

The district's problems are deep-seated and not a few Capitol Hill politicians consider it a national disaster area. Mayor Marion S. Berry's conviction for possession of crack cocaine in 1990 and his subsequent reelection after prison time have only added to the negative picture.

  • Schools in the city's poorest neighborhoods are failing to educate children, whose test scores are invariably dead last compared to their peers throughout the country -- even while the school system exceeded its budget by $62 million in the most recent school year.

  • Washingtonians have long complained the roads are poorly maintained, the water tastes bad, murders and drug dealing are commonplace -- and bureaucrats are surly and inefficient.

  • Infant mortality was 16.2 per 1,000 births in 1995 -- exceeding the rate in Third World Sri Lanka of 16.

  • In D.C., 13.4 percent of babies were born underweight in 1995 -- compared to 13 percent in Zambia.

A World Bank urban planner who was born in India and has worked for the bank in Pakistan and Vietnam comments that Washington has always struck her "as being much more a Third World city" than many of the cities she has been to. "Everybody here is pretty horrified at the way this place works," she adds.

Source: Michael M. Phillips, "The World Bank, Third-World Savior, Aids Washington," Wall Street Journal, August 27, 1998.

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