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Clearly none of this happened. So UNEP officials “disappeared” their maps and data from its web site without explanation, until some gifted journalists, who had cached it all, brought it back to the world’s attention. If UNEP was a department in any Canadian college or university, it would have been closed down and its professors fired. But that does not happen at the UN.

Then there is the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), which works all over the developing world and, strangely, has more than 637 millionaires among its employees. How can this be? Believe it or not, the UNDP had a program in North Korea during the late 1990s. The Wall Street Journal took an interest in it, pointing out that North Korea and the UNDP had violated all the rules that the UNDP sets up for its projects, and suggested that up to US$100 million of UNDP money was siphoned off by the government of the late Kim Jong Il. Now we know where some of the money for those millionaires may come from.

Then there is the United Nations Development Program, which works all over the developing world and, strangely, has more than 637 millionaires among its employees

Finally, as far back as 1997, investigative journalist Catherine Caulfield published her book on the World Bank, called Masters of Illusion. Her goal was simply to see if the World Bank’s promises about its projects are borne out in results. She found that World Bank projects had a 40 to 50 per cent success rate, according to the World Bank’s own internal evaluations, and many critics will say that these internal evaluations are in themselves suspect. I tend to agree. When I was working on a Swiss government development project in East Africa in 2005, I came into contact with a number of young, Western-educated African managers of World Bank projects. Privately, they told me that, on average, 40 per cent of each World Bank project budget was lost to corrupt practices. Caulfield’s evaluation is probably too generous.