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News Release Archive | World Bank | Accuracy.Org

World Bank: First Qualified President?

March 23, 2012

MARK WEISBROT, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net
Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. He said today: “The Obama administration’s announcement that it will nominate health expert and Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim for World Bank president represents a historic milestone in the institution’s history, with the U.S. nominating, for the first time, a qualified candidate. This is a huge step forward. If Kim becomes World Bank President, he’ll be the first qualified president in 68 years. Kim’s nomination is a victory for all the people, organizations, and governments that stood up to the Obama administration and demanded an open, merit-based process.

“Much of Kim’s career was with Partners in Health, which Kim co-founded. Partners in Health is a uniquely dynamic and enormously capable organization that has implemented important changes in approaches to preventing and treating diseases and other health problems, and Kim deserves much credit for that.

“However, the Bank’s process is still deeply flawed because the majority of the world’s countries are not really involved and I hope that for the next presidency, they will come together long in advance to agree on a candidate.”

Weisbrot noted the importance of Jeffrey Sachs’ candidacy as having busted open the process and “raised the bar for whom could be nominated. Sachs’ campaigning for the Bank’s presidency was unprecedented in its openness, in Sachs’ platform of reform for the Bank, and in terms of Sachs’ qualifications as an economist with extensive experience in economic development and as a health expert, who, like Kim, has worked to fight diseases such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis.

“Once Sachs was nominated, it was clear it would be very difficult for the Obama administration to follow past practice and simply choose, again, a political insider or a banker,” Weisbrot said. Weisbrot noted that Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s nomination by several African countries today also “represents an unprecedented challenge to the U.S. government’s traditional domination in choosing the next World Bank president.”

STEPHANY GRIFFITH JONES, sgj2108 at columbia.edu
Chilean and British economist Stephany Griffith-Jones, currently Financial Markets Program Director at the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University recently wrote the piece “What Makes Jose Antonio Ocampo a Good Candidate for President of the World Bank.”

She said today: “Jim Yong Kim is certainly an interesting choice, and he might be a great candidate to head up a health organization, but the World Bank is focused on development and infrastructure. Someone like Ocampo has that background in economics and development, and he has chosen to spend an important part of his career working in Colombia, the developing country where he was born.”

In her recent article, Griffith-Jones wrote: “Jose Antonio provides the rare combination of an experienced and successful policy-maker at the highest level (he was Minister of three portfolios in Colombia, including Finance, but also Agriculture and Planning), an outstanding international civil servant again at the highest level (including as Under Secretary General at the United Nations, as well as well as Head of the UN Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean), and a leading academic researcher in key issues relating to development and macro-economic policy.”

Griffith-Jones notes that Reuters recently reported: “While Ocampo had agreed to stand and Brazil was willing to nominate him, Colombian Finance Minister Juan Carlos Echeverry said on Thursday that Colombia was instead focusing on a bid for the presidency of the International Labor Organization.”

Tagged With: economy, Mark Weisbrot, Stephany Griffith Jones, World Bank,

Summers at World Bank? Record on Poor Countries and Gender Bias

March 21, 2012

ROBERT WEISSMAN, via Barbara Holzer, bholzer at citizen.org, Dorry Samuels, dsamuels at citizen.org
President of Public Citizen, Weissman just wrote the piece “The (Larry) Summers of Our Discontent,” which states: “‘Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries)?’

“Do those sound like the words of a man who should be running the world’s leading economic development institution?

“They don’t, but the man who put his name on the memo in which those words appeared — Lawrence Summers — does in fact appear to be the Obama administration’s leading candidate to head the World Bank.

“For the sake of hundreds of millions of people for whose lives and life chances are shaped in some significant part by World Bank policy, please urge President Obama not to nominate Larry Summers to be World Bank president. Sign the petition at http://ForgetLarry.org.

“The World Bank is supposed to be the development bank for the world’s poor. It has a very poor record of fulfilling its mission — precisely because it has pushed the kind of deregulatory policies that Summers has advocated.

“By indefensible tradition, the United States is given the power to name the Bank’s president, and it has always named an American — even though the Bank is governed by a board that represents the world’s nations, and the Bank’s mission is to serve poor countries. In 2005, the Bush administration named neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz to run the Bank. That ended in disaster, when Wolfowitz was forced to resign amidst a personal scandal. It’s hard to imagine the Obama administration is on the verge of making a similarly outrageous pick to head the Bank, but that seems to be the case.”

SHAUNNA THOMAS, Doug Gordon, Doug at fitzgibbonmedia.com
Thomas is co-founder of UltraViolet, an advocacy group focusing on gender inequality, they have organized a petition to President Obama: “Please don’t nominate Larry Summers to head the World Bank. Summers has a long history of making sexist comments and the World Bank has so much control over the lives of women and girls in developing countries. We need someone there who believes that women and girls have the same potential as men and boys.”

ELAINE ZUCKERMAN, elainez at genderaction.org
President and founder of Gender Action, Zuckerman worked on development and gender issues at the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank for years. She said today: “It would be a travesty for Summers to become the head of the World Bank. He was essentially fired as president of Harvard for saying that women didn’t have equal mental capacities as men. He argued that dumping toxic waste in Africa made sense.

“Working inside the World Bank, I noticed this deep divide between the lofty rhetoric on gender issues and the reality of the investments the Bank makes. It talks so much about reproductive health and HIV, but only puts less than one percent of investments there.

“The World Bank finances dirty energy projects — at Gender Action, we work with local partners — and these projects really hurt local women and girls. World Bank-financed pipelines overwhelmingly hire men. The construction of such projects causes female farmers to be displaced and forced into prostitution. Pipeline leaks cause a myriad of health problems for women. Roads that are built end up being conduits for trafficking in women. We need someone atop the World Bank who will push for investments that help — not harm — poor women and girls around the world.”

See also, Robert Kuttner just wrote a piece on Summers “Pick Me! Pick Me!” The piece states: “Why does Larry Summers have more lives than a cat? He was fired as president of Harvard, did not exactly serve President Obama brilliantly as economic policy czar, and now seems to be in line for the presidency of the World Bank, a post traditionally chosen by the president of the United States.”

Filed Under: Tagged With: Elaine Zuckerman, Robert Weissman, Shaunna Thomas, World Bank,

Congressional Push for Sachs as Next World Bank Head

March 16, 2012

For the first time in the World Bank’s history, a candidate is openly campaigning for presidency of the institution. Traditionally, the U.S. government has hand-selected the World Bank president, but economist and health expert Jeffrey Sachs has shaken up the process this time by publicly proclaiming his interest in succeeding Robert Zoellick as World Bank president, saying that to date World Bank presidents have been political appointees or bankers — not development experts.

Members of Congress are expected Friday to deliver a letter to President Obama urging him to nominate Sachs, now the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University to be the next World Bank president. A letter initiated by Rep. John Conyers and signed by over 25 members of Congress states: “Professor Sachs is widely considered to be the world’s leading expert on economic development and the fight against poverty. For over 25 years, he has advised dozens of governments throughout the developing world on economic development, environmental sustainability, poverty alleviation, debt cancellation, and globalization. He has twice been named among Time Magazine’s 100 most influential world leaders.”

MARK WEISBROT, DEBORAH JAMES, via Dan Beeton, beeton at cepr.net
Weisbrot is co-director fo the Center for Economic and Policy Research. James is director of international policy for the group. Weisbrot has written several pieces about the World Bank including “Why Jeffrey Sachs Would Make a Better World Bank President.”

James said today: “Folks in the U.S. who care about ending the suffering of the world’s poorest, have an opportunity to do something about it over the next week by demanding that President Obama nominate Jeffrey Sachs, probably the world’s best-known development leader, instead of current front-runner Larry Summers, who would just continue to use the Bank to push disastrous neoliberal economic policies and U.S. elite interests. Unfortunately, no developing country leaders have been nominated; however, many developing countries have already nominated Sachs. In addition to being a world candidate, he should also be the candidate of the U.S. After so many decades of damaging policies, we need someone at the World Bank who is deeply committed to a multidisciplinary, practical approach to eradicating poverty while living within the earth’s natural systems to prevent climate collapse.”

Weisbrot said today: “Sachs’ campaign for the World Bank presidency has already succeeded in highlighting the secretive, corrupt, and anti-democratic process by which the president is normally selected, as well as some of the major failings of the Bank itself. It is especially encouraging that a number of countries have been willing to confront the Obama administration by nominating or supporting him.

“President Obama wants to appoint a crony who will do what Treasury and Wall Street (pardon the redundancy) want the Bank to do. Sachs, on the other hand, wants the Bank to do more to help poor countries fight disease and poverty, and has a track record of doing this: including through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria, the Millennium Villages Project, the Earth Institute, and other research and practical projects. He has also been a strong advocate for debt cancellation for developing countries and for stronger measures to combat climate change.”

Sachs has himself written an op-ed in the Washington Post: “How I Would Lead the World Bank” and has received the backing of numerous other individuals, from the prime ministers of Kenya, Namibia and Haiti, to noted economists such as Nouriel Roubini.

Filed Under: Tagged With: corporations, economy, World Bank,