Analysis: US must loosen grip on leadership if Bank is to help save world

The world is at a crossroads. Either the global community will join together to fight poverty, resource depletion, and climate change, or it will face a generation of resource wars, political instability, and environmental ruin.

The World Bank, if properly led, can play a key role in averting these threats and the risks that they imply. The global stakes are thus very high this spring as the Bank’s 187 member countries choose a new president to succeed Robert Zoellick, whose term ends in July.

The World Bank was established in 1944 to promote economic development. Its central mission is to reduce global poverty and ensure that global development is environmentally sound and socially inclusive.

Yet, American officials have traditionally viewed the World Bank as an extension of United States foreign policy and commercial interests. Now many members, including Brazil, China, India, and several African countries, are raising their voices in support of more collegial leadership.

From the Bank’s establishment until today, the unwritten rule has been that the US government simply designates each new president: all 11 have been Americans, and not a single one has been an expert in economic development. Instead, the US has selected Wall Street bankers and politicians.

Yet the policy is backfiring on the US and badly hurting the world. Because of a long-standing lack of strategic expertise at the top, the Bank has lacked a clear direction and has solved far too few global problems.

For too long, the Bank’s leadership has imposed US concepts that are often utterly inappropriate for the poorest countries. For example, the Bank fumbled the pandemics of Aids, tuberculosis, and malaria during the 1990s, failing to get help to where it was needed to save millions of lives.

The Bank similarly missed crucial opportunities to support subsistence farmers and to promote integrated rural development more generally in impoverished rural communities in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The Bank’s staff is highly professional, and would accomplish much more if freed from the dominance of narrow US interests and viewpoints. The Bank has the potential to be a catalyst of progress in key areas that will shape the world’s future, with the focus on agricultural productivity, education and communication.

Most importantly, the Bank’s new president should have first-hand professional experience regarding the range of pressing development challenges. The world should not accept the status quo.

A World Bank leader who once again comes from Wall Street or from US politics would be a heavy blow for a planet in need of creative solutions to complex development challenges.

• Jeffrey Sachs is professor of economics and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also special adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.