The IDB’s measures of the impact of the funds and the outstanding is- sues and conclusions from the IDB study are summarized here. Despite the large amount of resources that the IDB and the World Bank have been lending to the funds, their scope is small. Only one fund in the region, Nicaragua, spends as much as 1 percent of the gross domes- tic product (GDP) in its fund; only three countries—Chile, Panama, and Uruguay—spend more than US$15 per year per poor person. And the poor countries on average spend less than US$10 a year. In other words, the impact of these funds is necessarily small, because their.
