The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programs.

The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty. According to the World Bank's Articles of Agreement (As amended effective 16 February 1989) all of its decisions must be guided by a commitment to promote foreign investment, international trade and facilitate capital investment.

The World Bank differs from the World Bank Group, in that the World Bank comprises only two institutions: the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA), whereas the former incorporates these two in addition to three more:International Finance Corporation (IFC), Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

The World Bank is one of five institutions created at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. The International Monetary Fund, a related institution, is the second. Delegates from many countries attended the Bretton Woods Conference. The most powerful countries in attendance were the United States and United Kingdom, which dominated negotiations.

Joseph Eugene Stiglitz, ForMemRS, FBA, (born February 9, 1943) is an American economist and a professor at Columbia University. He is a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2001) and the John Bates Clark Medal (1979). He is also the former Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He is known for his critical view of the management of globalization, free-market economists (whom he calls "free market fundamentalists") and some international institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

In 2000, Stiglitz founded the Initiative for Policy Dialogue (IPD), a think tank on international development based at Columbia University. Since 2001, he has been a member of the Columbia faculty, and has been a University Professor since 2003. He also chairs the University of Manchester's Brooks World Poverty Institute and is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. Stiglitz is an honorary doctor of Durham Business School, an honorary doctor at the Charles University, an honorary professor at Tsinghua University School of Public Policy and Management and a member of the Executive and Supervisory Committee (ESC) of CERGE-EI in Prague. Stiglitz is one of the most frequently cited economists in the world.

Jim Yong Kim, also known as Kim Yong (Hangul: 김용; Hanja: 金墉; born December 8, 1959) is a Korean-American physician and the president-elect of the World Bank. He has been President of Dartmouth College since 2009. He was formerly the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a co-founder and executive director of Partners In Health.

On March 2, 2009, Kim was named as the 17th president of Dartmouth College, a position he formally assumed on July 1, 2009, becoming the first Asian-American president of an Ivy League institution.

On March 23, 2012, President Barack Obama announced that the United States would nominate Kim as the next president of the World Bank. On April 16, Kim was elected to head the World Bank and will take office on July 1.

Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1959, Jim Yong Kim moved with his family to the U.S. at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, while his mother received her PhD in philosophy. Kim attended Muscatine High School, where he was valedictorian, president of his class, and played both quarterback for the football team and point guard on the basketball team. After a year and a half at the University of Iowa, he transferred to Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in 1982. He was awarded an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991, and a PhD from Harvard University, Department of Anthropology, in 1993. He was among the first enrollees of Harvard's experimental MD/PhD program in the social sciences.

John Richard Pilger (born 9 October 1939) is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London.

Since his early years as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Pilger has been a strong critic of American and British foreign policy, which he considers to be driven by an imperialist agenda. Pilger has also criticised his native country's treatment of Indigenous Australians and the practices of the mainstream media. In the UK print media, he has had a long association with the Daily Mirror, and writes a fortnightly columnn for the New Statesman magazine.

Pilger has twice won Britain's Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries, screened internationally, have gained awards in Britain and worldwide, and the journalist has received several honorary doctorates.

Pilger was born and raised in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney. He attended Sydney Boys High School, where he started a student newspaper, The Messenger, and later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, he later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph where he was a reporter, sports writer and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was for a year a freelance correspondent in Italy.