Kevin Rafferty

Opinion | The World Bank still has a role to play if its next chief can transform it into a force for change

Kevin Rafferty says in a world where infrastructure funding and leadership on tackling climate change are still an urgent need, the World Bank must rid itself of undue government interference and set the agenda for the greater global good

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Jim Yong Kim, who recently resigned as World Bank president, with Ivanka Trump, daughter of US President Donald Trump, before the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative panel discussion during the IMF World Bank Group annual meetings at the IMF headquarters in Washington in October 2017. Photo: EPA-EFE

Kevin Rafferty

Published: 3:00am, 5 Feb 2019Updated: 9:11am, 5 Feb 2019

An awful lot of wishful thinking has been pedalled about the need for the new president of the World Bank to be the best qualified person for the job. Depressingly, the so-called leaders responsible for choosing the successor to Jim Yong Kim show few signs of caring about who runs the bank or its role.

Kim’s unexpected resignation should have helped concentrate minds on the impending challenges facing the world. They include the continuing fracturing of the global economic order – but without a new system to replace it; the declining power of the United States and irresponsibility of US President Donald Trump – but the inability of other countries to stand up to Washington; and the lack of leadership either to patch up the old system or design a new one.

Kim, a medical doctor, was president of Dartmouth College. He had no qualifications as an economist, banker or head of a large international organisation. But, in 2012, president Barack Obama overrode the growing clamour that the World Bank’s president should be chosen on merit, not by fiat of the US president, and nominated Kim.

Obama’s minions did backroom deals to persuade most of Europe, Japan, Russia and China to support Kim, forestalling a credible challenge from Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former Nigerian finance minister and erstwhile World Bank managing director.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala posed a credible challenge to Jim Kim Yong’s appointment as World Bank chief in 2012. Photo: EPA

Obama compounded his error in 2016 by securing a second five-year term for Kim. The purported aim was to protect the appointment from the hubbub of the first months of a new US president, who might even be Trump, although that prospect then seemed remote.