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2012-04-03 11:27:19
A golden opportunity for the rest of the world to show Barack Obama the meaning of meritocracy
Mar 31st 2012 | from the print edition
WHEN economists from the World Bank visit poor countries to dispense cash and advice, they routinely tell governments to reject cronyism and fill each important job with the best candidate available. It is good advice. The World Bank should take it. In appointing its next president, the bank s board should reject the nominee of its most influential shareholder, America, and pick Nigeria s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
The World Bank is the world s premier development institution. Its boss needs experience in government, in economics and in finance (it is a bank, after all). He or she should have a broad record in development, too. Ms Okonjo-Iweala has all these attributes, and Colombia s Jos Antonio Ocampo has a couple. By contrast Jim Yong Kim, the American public-health professor whom Barack Obama wants to impose on the bank, has at most one.
Ms Okonjo-Iweala is in her second stint as Nigeria s finance minister. She has not broken Nigeria s culture of corruption an Augean task but she has sobered up its public finances and injected a measure of transparency. She led the Paris Club negotiations to reschedule her country s debt and earned rave reviews as managing director of the World Bank in 2007-11. Hers is the CV of a formidable public economist.
Mr Ocampo was also finance minister, though his time in office, 1996-98, saw the budget deficit balloon. He ran the mildly statist UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. His is the CV of the international bureaucrat.
Mr Kim, the head of a university in New England, has done a lot of good things in his life, but the closest he has come to running a global body was as head of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation not a post requiring tough choices between, say, infrastructure, health and education. He pioneered trials of aid programmes before they became fashionable and set up an outfit called Partners in Health which does fine work in Haiti and Peru. But this is a charity, not a development bank. Had Mr Obama not nominated him, he would be on no one s shortlist to lead the World Bank. (Indeed he is a far worse example of Western arrogance than Christine Lagarde, whom the Europeans shoehorned into the IMF job last year: the French finance minister plainly had the CV for the job.)
Ms Okonjo-Iweala is an orthodox economist, which many will hold against her. But if there is one thing the world has discovered about poverty reduction in the past 15 years, it is that development is not something rich countries do to poor ones. It is something poor countries manage for themselves, mainly by the sort of policies that Ms Okonjo-Iweala has pursued with some success in Nigeria.
Mr Kim s views on development are harder to divine. But what can be gleaned is worrying. In an introduction to a 2000 book called Dying for Growth , he wrote that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of men and women , quoted Noam Chomsky and praised Cuba for prioritising social equity . Were Mr Kim hoping to lead Occupy Wall Street, such views would be unremarkable. But the purposes of the World Bank, according to its articles of agreement, are to promote private foreign investment [and to] encourage international investment for the development of the productive resources of members. The Bank promotes growth because growth helps the poor. If Mr Kim disagrees, he should stick to medicine.
Ready. Steady. Ngo
For almost 70 years, the leadership of the IMF and World Bank has been subject to an indefensible carve-up. The head of the IMF is European; the World Bank, American. This shabby tradition has persisted because it has not been worth picking a fight over. The gap between Mr Kim and Ms Okonjo-Iweala changes the calculation. It gives others a chance to insist on the best candidate, not simply the American one. Mr Ocampo should bow out gracefully. And the rest of the world should rally round Ms Okonjo-Iweala. May the best woman win.
from the print edition | Leaders