“As Jim Yong Kim takes over as president of the World Bank, he will find himself at the helm of a poverty-fighting organization where large, emerging-market members no longer need it to finance much of their development.
Instead, it will be up to Kim to keep the bank relevant to China, Brazil and other nations that have access to private investors. With some countries even becoming rival lenders in Africa and Latin America, one of Kim’s main challenges is to keep them as clients and contributors, saidNancy Birdsall, president of the Washington-based Center for Global Development.
“It’s no longer a question of the bank doing things for those countries,” said Birdsall, a former director of policy research at the World Bank. “It’s a question of how those countries will engage with the bank, not only as possible borrowers but as participants for strengthening the capital base of the bank, as participants in pushing for policy changes.”
Kim’s selection yesterday over candidates from Nigeria andColombia extends a U.S. monopoly on the top job just as the share of emerging markets in the global economy increases. The 52-year-old physician said in a statement he “will seek a new alignment of the World Bank Group with a rapidly changing world,” fostering an institution that “amplifies the voices ofdeveloping countries.”
Brazil, Russia, India and China, the so-called BRIC group of major emerging markets, will account for 23 percent of the world’s output in 2016, up from 19 percent in 2011, according to a report by Grant Thornton International Ltd. The share of Group of Seven countries, which includes the U.S., Germany and Japan, will decline to 44 percent from 48 percent in the same time frame, it said….”
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