Publications /
Opinion

Back
World Bank: A Hummingbird on the Firing Line
Authors
January 14, 2019

Last week Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, unexpectedly announced his resignation, effective as soon as next month and three and a half years prior to the end of his second mandate. Given the current environment of challenged and weakened multilateralism, the aftermath of his succession has a relevance that transcends the limits of that institution.

While an analyst has alluded to President Kim as “voting with his feet” on the World Bank's loss of significance in investment in developing countries, the impact of what the institution does should not be reduced to the size of its funding flows. In addition to serving as a benchmark for high quality - governance, social and environmental impacts and others - for private and public investments in the areas where it operates, the World Bank has increasingly focused on actions and financial operations through which it leverages private investments in a complementary way.

The Bank also holds an extraordinary intangible asset that goes beyond its ability to mobilize financial resources. Take any complex and multidisciplinary development challenge. The Bank is uniquely able to break it down into parts, address each of them, and rebuild it back with integrated solutions. In this sense, it provides a global public good with the multisectoral, analytical organizational capacity that it has developed throughout its evolution. Having spent most of my last 15 professional years working at the Bank, I have been able to see the exercise of such a capacity on many occasions. As in the case of a natural resource use strategy called for by the Indonesian government for which engineers, economists, and social policy experts have mastered their exercise of decomposition and reconstruction.

Another global public good provided by the Bank comes from its role as a kind of hummingbird, pollinating knowledge as it carries across national borders lessons learned from successes and mistakes in the places where it operates. As a multilateral institution, it is a peculiarly reliable source of evaluation of public policies of member countries, being able to construct parameters and indicators about those countries’ performance in many policy dimensions.

As an example of its hummingbird function, at the time I was a vice president at the institution, the Bank facilitated an interexchange between Mongolia and Chile on the latter’s successful experience of management and developmental use of natural resource richness in copper. In a similar way, the Bank was able to diffuse to many developing countries the lessons accrued from the Brazilian experience with conditional cash transfers. More recently, a major project to deal with urban floods in Manila, Philippines has benefited from the experience gained by the team that had previously worked with poor houses on stilts in Salvador, Brazil. As a region comprising many countries classified as "middle income" by the Bank, Latin America and the Caribbean has played a significant role both as a destination and as a source of financial results and learning for the Bank.

The provision of such global public goods depends largely on the institution's work not being adversely affected by instability or major fractures in its multilateral governance superstructure. As a bank with capital shares heterogeneously distributed among its members, everything it does inevitably depends on continuously finding a balance - a "weighted average" - among "voices" with differentiated volumes. It was not by chance that the institution entered a tailspin during President Wolfowitz's (2005-07) administration, when the top command maneuvered around the Bank's board of executive directors and arm-twisted the bureaucracy to align strictly country relationships with foreign policy priorities then prevailing in the US government. The revolt of other shareholders and the institutional paralysis ended up being solved only after a traumatic departure from the president.

That is why the transition abruptly starting at the World Bank is very important, given the risks that the adverse conjuncture for multilateralism might contaminate the process and what the institution does. In my judgment, it matters less the nationality - natural or acquired - of who is selected and more the observance, in its exercise, of the balance to which we referred.

Likewise, it will matter a lot if the choice is of someone with a proven track record of leadership, experience of managing large organizations with international exposure, and a familiarity with the public sector – attributes announced by the Bank's board of executive directors for the selection of Jim Kim's successor. Instead of symbology or political affection on the part of public authorities of some major shareholder, the chosen must be able to articulate a clear vision of the Bank's multilateral development mission, rather than attempting to build one only after being in office.

As history shows, attempts to submit the institution to strictly bilateral agendas or to extreme points of view in relation to what most shareholders want it to do - as for example would be the case of attempts to shrink or reverse what is done there regarding climate change - would only result in paralysis or death of the hummingbird.

RELATED CONTENT

  • Authors
    Pierre Jacquemot
    December 26, 2019
    Depuis 2000, selon une approche et un calendrier qui ont été maintes fois modifiés, les 15 membres de la Communauté Économique des États de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (CEDEAO) ont exprimé leur volonté d’accélérer le processus d’intégration monétaire dans la région. Le récent débat autour de la Zone franc et sa réforme, désormais décidée avec la France, mais également l’enthousiasme manifesté autour de la création de la Zone de libre-échange continentale (ZLEAf) formellement créée le 30 ma ...
  • December 19, 2019
    Emerging market and developing economies: Engine of the global economic growth despite some vulnerabilities1 After a long spell of slow growth post-crisis, the global economy’s recovery was mainly supported by the improvement of emerging markets and developing economies growth. However, this recovery is subject to wide-ranging uncertainties and is now in some danger. According to the IMF, the global economic growth is expected to fall to 3 % in 2019, the lowest level since 2008. Th ...
  • Authors
    Numéro spécial du cahier du plan - Volume 2
    December 18, 2019
    Lors du colloque autour du thème « Croissance économique au Maroc : théories, évidences et leçons des expériences récentes », organisé conjointement par le Haut-Commissariat au Plan (HCP) et le Policy Center for the New South et accueilli par le HCP en mai 2017 dans ses locaux à Rabat, des experts et praticiens de près de 30 institutions académiques et non académiques ont échangé et débattu de la croissance économique au Maroc dans un framework transverse alliant le théorique au pra ...
  • December 17, 2019
    L’Inde est confrontée, aujourd’hui, à plusieurs défis énergétiques : - Assurer la sécurité énergétique du pays, en généralisant l’accès pour tous à l’électricité. Ce qui n’est pas le cas en 2019. - Le faire en réduisant sa dépendance aux énergies fossiles, afin de mieux répondre aux orientations des Conférences des parties, COP 21 et COP 22. Pour cela, les autorités gouvernementales vont mener, dès 1981, une réflexion sur les énergies renouvelables, les conduisant à privilégier l ...
  • Authors
    December 2, 2019
    Following the global financial crisis of 2007-08, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) went through a period of self-examination. The old joke that its acronym stood for “It’s Mostly Fiscal” bothered some of its leaders, who believed the organization needed to focus less on austerity and more thoroughly consider issues such as inequality, poverty reduction and gender equality when making loans and other key decisions. There was talk of a “new IMF” that had learned from its old mist ...
  • Authors
    November 22, 2019
    Le rêve d’un monde en développement qui voit ses inégalités se réduire, la condition de vie de ses populations s’améliorer significativement, tout en profitant du bonheur procuré par une population jeune, reste à portée de main. Les macro-économistes ne diront certainement pas le contraire quand on soutient que la plus grande invention de Robert Mundell a sans doute été l’idée du triangle d’incompatibilité. Le concept de Mundell consiste en l’impossibilité de voir coexister de faço ...
  • November 13, 2019
    La décennie 2009-2019 a vu se développer les crypto-monnaies. Ce que certains appellent des unités de compte cryptées. Cette étude est consacrée à deux d’entre elles : le Bitcoin, créé en 2009, et la Libra, dont les premières devraient apparaître en 2020. Deux crypto-monnaies qui peuvent s’opposer ou se compléter. Unité de compte reconnue, le Bitcoin va vite apparaître aussi spéculatif, l’éloignant du caractère monétaire que certains veulent lui attribuer. A l’inverse, la Libra, mon ...
  • Authors
    October 28, 2019
    Global GDP has slowed sharply, from near 4% in late 2017 to half that rate on an annualized basis in recent quarters. The downturn in fortunes over the last two years has come as a big surprise. The rapid expansion of 2016/2017 was broad based but died young. Prior to it we had suffered seven long years of slow growth in the wake of the global financial crisis Why did such a sharp and steady slowdown occur against a background of loose monetary policy, supportive fiscal policy, low ...
  • Authors
    Under the Supervision of
    October 2, 2019
    Africa is an economic region which holds great potential despite the risks associated with its development. Indeed, many experts agree that Africa is emerging as the new frontier for global growth. Boosted by its abundant natural resources, a young and vibrant population, strong urbanization, more stable macroeconomic conditions, more stringent economic policies, a constantly improving business climate and improving governance, Africa is on track for a structural transformation that ...
  • September 24, 2019
    En pleine transition ordonnée de son régime de change, sous l'autorité bienveillante du Fonds monétaire international (FMI), le Royaume du Maroc est un exemple très concret des avantages et des inconvénients des deux régimes de change dominants ces dernières décennies/change fixe et change flottant /. L’objet de cette note est de rappeler, tout d'abord, les fondamentaux économiques des deux systèmes et leur environnement historique (I). Ensuite, à la lumière de ces fondamentaux, pré ...