Inappropriate institutionalized reward systems

Counter-productive personnel reward systems

Nature

Organizations and institutions with internal reward systems that operate in terms of criteria unrelated to the social problems that the institution is mandated to deal with tend to encourage personnel to formulate policies and approve projects which fail to respond to such social problems.

Claim

It has been suggested that the reason that the World Bank has failed to give any priority to population control in practice is that personnel are rewarded, and achieve status, by committing large sums of money to construction projects. Population projects call for smaller amounts of capital investment and require lengthy and extensive dialogue. This offers little incentive within a bureaucracy whatever the declared policy commitments.