Obama goes for virtual unknown in World Bank nomination

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/mar/23/world-bank-nomination-jim-yong-kom

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Not Hillary Clinton. Not Larry Summers. Not Jeffrey Sachs or John Kerry. Instead, Barack Obama has put forward the South Korean-born health expert Jim Yong Kim to be the next president of the World Bank. The choice was a surprise: Kim is a doctor and a health expert but did not feature in the betting for one of the biggest international jobs going. Barring a miracle, though, he will get it.

Ever since the second world war, the Europeans have chosen the managing director of the International Monetary Fund with American support, and the White House has nominated the president of the World Bank with the backing of the Europeans. This is called a "gentleman's agreement", although a better description would be a blatant stitch-up.

Pressure from the bigger developing countries, which now make up a much bigger share of the global economy than they did in 1945, has meant that the Bank and the Fund jobs are supposed to be decided by an open and transparent process. In reality, nothing has changed, although the Europeans have at least been forced to put up heavyweight candidates — Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Christine Lagarde — on the last two occasions when the Fund job has fallen vacant.

The expectation was that Obama would feel obliged to do the same, hence the speculation that Clinton or perhaps Susan Rice, America's ambassador to the United Nations, would get the nod. Instead, he has gone for a virtual unknown. Dr Kim's current job as president of Dartmouth college in New Hampshire could hardly be said to prepare him for the huge management task of running the Bank.

The bigger developing countries might see this as presumptuous on Obama's part, particularly since there is an alternative in the form of Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank vice-president. But the US president believes Dr Kim's East Asian origins and his time at the World Health Organisation will garner support from developing countries and that the Europeans will not rock the boat. He is almost certainly right about that, although that does not alter the fact that the process stinks.