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IF THE competition to become the World Bank's next president
were a normal process, Jim Yong Kim wouldn't stand a chance.
The Dartmouth College president lacks two of the traditional
qualifications for running an international lending body: financial savvy and
diplomatic experience. But the race to lead the World Bank is everything but
ordinary – particularly this time.
Americans have always helmed the bank, which doled out some
$57bn in loans and grants to poor and middle-income countries last year alone.
Except for a congressman (Barber Conable) and a Ford Motor boss (Robert
McNamara), all 11 chiefs hailed from Wall Street firms like Lazard Freres,
First Boston and Chase Bank.
Even outgoing president Robert Zoellick spent some time on
the payroll of Goldman Sachs.
Not so the Korean-born physician Kim. At 52, he has spent
the past three years in bucolic Hanover, New Hampshire, where his biggest
diplomatic challenge appears to have been quelling -with mixed success,
according to a recent Rolling Stone exposé -a fondness among its fraternities
for painting their pledges in puke and even forcing them to eat it in
omelettes.
But there's logic to the Obama administration's choice for
the job.
Though it was decreed at the 1944 Bretton Woods confab that
the United States would name the bank's president, it has 186 other
stakeholders. And for the first time ever, they're making their voices heard.
When the World Bank board meets this week in Washington, it
will have two other candidates to interview: Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and José
Antonio Ocampo, the former finance ministers of Nigeria and Colombia,
respectively.
In another contest, their backgrounds would give them an
edge. But here's why Kim may be an inspired choice: if poverty's insidious
bedfellow is disease, it knows few enemies like Kim. He has a superhero's
resume of fighting the dark forces of illness.
Kim was a co-founder of Partners in Health, which is seeking
to eradicate infectious diseases like tuberculosis in the poorest nations on
the planet. He chaired the department of global hHealth and social medicine at
Harvard Medical School. In 2003, he moved to the World Health Organisation and
directed its efforts in fighting HIV and Aids.
True, none of this has anything to do with making loans. But
that's sort of the point. Kim's career has focused on the outcomes of
development rather than the process. At a moment when American control of the
bank is being challenged by the primary recipients of its largesse, that's a
critical distinction.
Kim may not gain the consensus of all 25 World Bank
directors when he sits down with them on Wednesday. Bric nations are keen to
flex their influence – last month in New Delhi they even discussed creating
their own version of a World Bank.
But putting a development specialist in charge for the first
time would certainly beat replicating past precedent. Imagine President Obama
naming Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein to lead a global effort to
eliminate poverty.
- Reuters
* This column appears in the April 9 issue of Newsweek. Rob Cox is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
