The World Development Report, a flagship report of the World Bank, is a document written by economists who treat politics as an inconvenient reality, though it is a thoroughly political document. The 2009 edition of the WDR, Reshaping Economic Geography, is critically discussed here, first, from a geographical disciplinary perspective. This article then demonstrates how the report erases politics by drawing on two national experiences, India and China, highlighted in the document as global hotspots of growth. The Report effectively promotes a checkbox style to development, exhorting policymakers to see themselves as managers of "portfolios of places".
