In his article Aid and Sovereignty: Quasi-States and the International Financial Institutions, David Williams, ‘Aid and Sovereignty: Quasi-states and the International Financial Institutions’, Review of International Studies, 26:4 (2000), pp. 557–73.David Williams claims that ‘(t)he activities of the IFIs [international financial institutions, RL] in their relations with many developing countries certainly suggest that the substance of state sovereignty does not amount to very much more than a show’ (p. 573). In my reply, I beg to differ with respect to the causes of the changing state sovereignty in developing countries and the role of international financial institutions, and of the World Bank in particular, in this process.However, as Stephen Krasner has sophistically shown, the violation, compromise and truncation of sovereignty has been a central feature of international relations since the very inception of the ‘Westphalian system’ in 1648. See Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).By offering a comparison concerning the structure of the interactions developing countries have with the IFIs and private capital markets, respectively, I conclude that the relationship between developing countries and private capital markets has more substantial effects on the changing nature of state sovereignty in the developing world.