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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
Editor’s Note: On April 16 the Executive Directors of the World Bank selected Dr. Jim Yong Kim as President for a five-year term beginning on July 1, 2012. A decision on choosing the next president of the World Bank is expected this week—perhaps as early as Monday. The Obama administration nominated Jim Yong Kim, president [...]
The surprise could hardly have been greater over the news that President Barack Obama had nominated Jim Young Kim, president of Dartmouth College, to the post as president of the World Bank. Before going to Dartmouth, Kim was a prominent professor of medicine and expert on global health issues. He has done extensive work on [...]
The World Bank is the second best international organization after the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in terms of reputation and quality, but it is an institution of diminishing significance. Its current president, Robert B. Zoellick, is stepping down at the end of his five-year term, and the Obama administration has announced that it will nominate [...]
The promising Arab Spring has left North Africa in limbo. Now the task is to build a new political and economic system that is sustainable. President Barack Obama’s speech on the Middle East on May 19 outlines most of the right economic features. When communism ended two decades ago, the Soviet Union fared much more [...]
As the International Monetary Fund and World Bank played host to the world’s finance ministers and central bankers in October, Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the model of the “activist IMF managing director” when he dared to address a question other Europeans prefer to ignore. What is to be done about Greece’s debt problems in the long [...]
Meeting in London last April, the G-20 leaders declared “that the heads and senior leadership of the international financial institutions [i.e., the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund] should be appointed through an open, transparent, and merit-based selection process [pdf].” When you look at the selection processes for other international “top policy positions,” however, [...]
Predictably, and perhaps appropriately, the flood of remembrances of Robert McNamara is focusing on his role as the architect of the Vietnam War. Yet McNamara was also a transformative president of the World Bank, shaping both that institution and the larger development enterprise in ways that are still felt today. McNamara served for 13 years [...]
Many times, since I first used the phrase in 1989, the “Washington Consensus” has been proclaimed dead, most recently by Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain at the press conference following the G-20 summit in London earlier this month. Yet most of the governments of the world seem to be determined to follow the precepts [...]
Forecasters at international organizations often find themselves in a delicate position. On the one hand, they have unparalleled access to hard data and intelligence about what is happening in every corner of the world economy. On the other hand, their main shareholders—the United States and larger European countries—do not want to hear predictions that are [...]
The IMF is signalling that it will further revise down its global growth forecast. This is after cutting the forecast sharply in October and again in November. Their latest published view is growth in 2009 will be 2.2 percent year-on-year, and 2.4 percent fourth quarter on fourth quarter. This view is dated November 6, 2008, [...]