As we closed the World Bank president poll this week, over 15,000 people had voted for their favourite developing country candidate.
The result? Well, our friends in Indonesia came out in force, resulting in a landslide victory for Sri Mulyani Indrawati, an Indonesian economist and one of the current Managing Directors of the World Bank Group, who beat her opponents with a staggering 87% of the votes.
It looks like things may be about to hot up. The BRICS group of major emerging market economies, meeting in the sidelines of a G20 meeting in Mexico said they will discuss whether to put forward their own candidate. Continue reading
Below is a guest post from Jorge Daniel Taillant, formerly executive director of the Centro de Derechos Humanos y Ambiente (Center for Human Rights and Environment, CEDHA) in Argentina:
In most sports, when your front runners simply aren’t cutting the mustard, the coach looks to the bench for new and energetic blood, mostly to radically change the way in which the strategy is being executed, an altercation to the tactics that are simply not working. It is not surprising that radical changes to the business as usual line up often leads to early
entry success and can fundamentally change the game play.
In this regard, we’ve had enough of industrialized country leadership (in fact, practically of single country leadership) of largely fledgling international finance corporations such as the IMF and in many ways, also the World Bank, both historically aligned along the Washington Consensus and both dominated by European and US intervention. And both, with little to show in terms of success.
We need a Lionel Messi 
to come off the bench and work development magic, and while that may not be an Argentine in this case, it should be a candidate from a developing country, one that has shown the ability to make bold and assertive decisions to address modern development challenges. Continue reading
A campaign group in the US has launched an online petition demanding that President Obama NOT nominate Larry Summers. The campaign group is called UltraViolet and it “fight[s] to expand women’s rights and combat sexism everywhere – from politics and government to media and pop culture.” Here is what their action says: Continue reading
Thousands of people have already voted on who they think should be the next World Bank President – add your vote now! The poll will close this Monday 27th February. Your votes may already be having an impact… bookmakers‘ odds are roughly in line with the poll results so far. Click here to vote.