May 19, 2007

NY Times on Picking a World Bank President

Link: Picking a World Bank President - New York Times.

For decades, the World Bank has lectured borrowers on the virtues of competitive bidding, merit selection and transparent procedures. Yet when it has come to choosing the bank’s leadership, Washington has never accepted those principles.

Custom gives United States presidents the power to award the World Bank presidency to any American — whether or not they have appropriate managerial skills or development credentials. European leaders exercise patronage authority over the top job at the International Monetary Fund.

That deeply flawed selection process produced the Paul Wolfowitz debacle. It is offensive not only for its hypocrisy, but because it has long made the bank a less effective and credible vehicle for financing international development than it should be. It ought to be reformed now, before Mr. Wolfowitz’s successor is chosen. The ground rules should be changed to require merit selection and open up the job to highly qualified applicants worldwide.

Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen. As part of the backroom negotiations that won over the White House and Mr. Wolfowitz to the idea of a resignation, the bank’s directors signaled that they would let President Bush decide who would fill out the three years left in the current presidential term.

Mr. Bush needs to choose more carefully than he did last time. He needs a high-quality nominee to raise the funds the bank will soon need from Congress and European donor nations, to rebuild battered staff morale, and, most important, to pursue a coherent development and anticorruption agenda.

Two plausible candidates now reportedly under consideration are Robert Zoellick, the former deputy secretary of state who is now a Goldman Sachs managing director, and Robert Kimmitt, deputy secretary of the Treasury.

A bolder choice would be Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official who holds American, as well as Afghan citizenship. Mr. Ghani did an impressive job as Afghanistan’s finance minister a few years back. That would allow Mr. Bush to choose an American while also getting someone with firsthand experience in the developing world.

While I'm impressed with Zoellick's service at Goldman, the reports on Zoellick's Wikipedia entry are not exactly flattering for someone seeking the top job on behalf of the world's poor:

Tom Barry, the policy director of the International Relations Center, has written that Zoellick "regards free trade philosophy and free trade agreements as instruments of U.S. national interests. When the principles of free trade affect U.S. short-term interests or even the interests of political constituencies, Zoellick is more a mercantilist and unilateralist than free trader or multilateralist."[14]

Gavan McCormack has written that Zoellick used his perch at USTR to advocate for Wall Street's policy goals abroad, as during a 2004 intervention in a key privatization issue in Japanese Prime Minister's Junichiro Koizumi's re-election campaign. Writes McCormack, "The office of the U.S. Trade Representative has played an active part in drafting the Japan Post privatization law. An October 2004 letter from Robert Zoellick to Japan’s Finance Minister Takenaka Heizo, tabled in the Diet on 2 August 2005, included a handwritten note from Zoellick commending Takenaka for the splendid job he was doing. Challenged to explain this apparent U.S. government intervention in a sensitive domestic matter, Koizumi merely expressed his satisfaction that Takenaka had been befriended by such an important figure... It is hard to overestimate the scale of the opportunity offered to U.S. and global finance capital by the privatization of the Postal Savings System."[15]

While not usually considered a neoconservative, Zoellick has strong affinities with them. In a January 2000 Foreign Affairs essay entitled "Campaign 2000: A Republican Foreign Policy," he was one of the first of those now associated with George W. Bush's foreign policy to invoke the notion of "evil," writing: "[T]here is still evil in the world — people who hate America and the ideas for which it stands. Today, we face enemies who are hard at work to develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, along with the missiles to deliver them. The United States must remain vigilant and have the strength to defeat its enemies. People driven by enmity or by a need to dominate will not respond to reason or goodwill. They will manipulate civilized rules for uncivilized ends." The same essay praises the "idealism" of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Two years earlier, Zoellick was one of the signatories (along with Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, John R. Bolton, Richard Armitage, William Kristol, and others) of a Jan. 26, 1998 letter to President Bill Clinton drafted by the Project for a New American Century calling for "removing Saddam's regime from power."[16]

A central focus of Zoellick since taking the position of Deputy Secretary of State has been Sudan, which he has visited four times. He supports expanding a United Nations force in the Darfur region to replace the African Union soldiers who are struggling to keep the peace there. He was involved in negotiating a peace accord between the government of Sudan and main Darfur rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army, signed in Abuja, Nigeria in May 2006.

Similarly, Kimmit's background, while impressive, does not clearly reveal extensive experience with the world's poor:

From 1985 to 1987, Mr. Kimmitt served as General Counsel to the U.S. Treasury Department, where he received the Alexander Hamilton Award, as well as the Arthur Flemming Award for distinguished public service. He served at the White House as National Security Council Executive Secretary and General Counsel from 1983 to 1985, with the rank of Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. From 1976 to 1977 and 1978 to 1983, Mr. Kimmitt was a member of the NSC Staff.

From April 1970 to August 1971, Mr. Kimmitt served in combat with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam, earning three Bronze Star Medals, the Purple Heart, the Air Medal, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He retired in November 2004 as a Major General in the Army Reserve. During 1997 Mr. Kimmitt was a member of the National Defense Panel, and from 1998 to 2005 he was a member of the Director of Central Intelligence’s National Security Advisory Panel. He also served as a member of the Panel of Arbitrators of the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes.

Before rejoining the government, Mr. Kimmitt was Chairman of the International Advisory Council of Time Warner Inc., where he had served from July 2001 to February 2005 as Executive Vice President, Global Public Policy. From March through August 2005, he was also Senior International Counsel in the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr. Earlier, Mr. Kimmitt was Vice Chairman and President of Commerce One, a software company headquartered in the San Francisco Bay area. From 1997 to 2000, Mr. Kimmitt was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, and from 1993 to 1997 he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers. From 1987 to 1989, Mr. Kimmitt was a partner in the law firm of Sidley & Austin.

His involvement with ICSID arbitrations is interesting but hardly sufficient by itself to give broad understanding to development issues.

Posted by Anupam Chander on May 19, 2007 at 08:16 AM in Globalization | Permalink