Dear readers and contributors,
Despite the professed commitment of the World Bank’s executive directors and our best efforts to ensure an open, transparent and merit-based process for the selection of the World Bank president, the multilateral institution is once again led by a US national. This follows the highly illegitimate process that saw the US candidate run unopposed, keeping the 75-year-old ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ firmly intact.
This was a “race” steeped in geopolitics with little incentive for Southern (or other) candidates to put their name forward to compete with the US nominee.
While we will say farewell for now, we hope to count on your continued support in holding Mr. Malpass and the World Bank generally accountable for their actions (or omissions).
As you also know, whatever the challenges and geopolitical realities, we strongly believe that the World Bank and IMF must change their leadership selection processes so that both institutions have leaders with the required skills and experience, selected through an open, fair and transparent process.
We hope that we can count on your support in our future efforts and will soon turn our attention to the 2021 selection of the IMF’s next Managing Director, with the eventual re-launch of the imfboss.org website. We hope that we will not be caught quite as off (La)guard as we were with Jim Kim’s early departure.
In that regard, it would be useful to begin to think how we may be able to increase the visibility of both sites and involvement of partners from the global South.
Any thoughts or ideas, please contact us at ialvarez@brettonwoodsproject.org
Until next time,
The World Bank Prez blog team