Decoding Dr Kim

Thinking strategically about Obama's World Bank choice

The decision by US President Barack Obama to nominate Jim Yong Kim as the American candidate for the top job at the World Bank came as a surprise. Various names, most of them with a higher profile than the president of Dartmouth College, were being thrown about — senior White House advisor Larry Summers, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and economist Jeffrey Sachs. Any of these nominations would have been considered business as usual. Indeed, they might have been seen as straightforward attempts by an internationally minded president to up the World Bank’s profile — while ensuring that little changed about the control exerted from Washington, DC, over the Bank’s lending and development agenda. Mr Obama’s decision to go with Dr Kim, on the other hand, has set off a firestorm of discussion.

On the one hand, there is the obvious question of Dr Kim’s ethnicity. He is of Korean birth; he was born in Seoul in 1959 and moved with his parents to the United States when he was five. His candidacy has been put forward at a time when discontent is running high over the cosy arrangement between Europe and the United States, in which a European always leads the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and an American always leads the World Bank. Europe’s repeated promises to liberalise the IMF leadership came to naught when the current incumbent, former French finance minister, replaced her disgraced compatriot Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Since then, Ms Lagarde has sometimes looked more like the managing director for the euro than the MD of the IMF. Mr Kim, on the other hand, demonstrates by his very existence – as does Mr Obama himself – the international nature of American citizenship and leadership. Criticism from East Asia will naturally be muted, and developing-world candidates, like Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, will find their candidacies have less traction.

However, Mr Kim’s background is interesting also because he is the first development professional to head the world’s largest development organisation. After qualifying as a doctor, he made his reputation by leading public health projects to minimise the effects of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and to make TB drugs cheaper. Multilateral organisations, once staffed by generalists, bureaucrats on deputations and bankers looking for easier jobs, are now increasingly destinations for those trained in development policy. Rather than have it headed by an interested outsider – the Robert McNamara or Paul Wolfowitz model – or by a banker-turned-public official, as the current incumbent Robert Zoellick, it is perhaps time to recognise that the World Bank is now specialised enough to require someone with experience in the trenches of development. For India, this is a much more interesting development than any tom-tomming for a “developing-world” candidate who will, once in the saddle, owe India little. The soft power that India, as a large supplier of development professionals and the largest laboratory for development work in the world, exerts over practitioners in the field is considerable. Instead of succumbing immediately to the eternal lure – and eternal disappointment – of developing-country solidarity, India should consider carefully which option is in its strategic interest.