U.S. President Barak Obama has nominated Jim Yong Kim, a Korean-American who leads Dartmouth College, to become president of the World Bank. Kim, if confirmed by the bank, will become the first Asian-American to head the institution in its 68-year history.
The bank has usually been headed by an American, while its sister organization, the International Monetary Fund, has always been led by a European.
Kim’s nomination is seen as a move aimed at fending off challenges from developing nations, which have nominated two candidates of their own. They are Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s finance minister who had served as a managing director of the World Bank until last year, and Jose Antonio Ocampo, a Columbia University professor who had worked as finance minister for Colombia.
But Kim is all but guaranteed of taking the reins at the bank, as the U.S. has the largest voting share in the institution and can expect support from Europe and Japan. The bank’s board of directors is expected to announce a new president on April 21.
Kim was born in Korea but his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was five. He earned a medical degree and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard.
While serving as a professor at Harvard, Kim founded Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization, to fight disease in poor countries. As Obama said announcing Kim’s nomination, “he has worked from Asia to Africa to the Americas, from capitals to small villages” to deliver health care to the poor.
Kim also worked as director of the HIV/AIDS department of the World Health Organization and is credited with leading an initiative that treated 3 million AIDS patients.
In 2009, Kim was named president of Dartmouth College, becoming the first Asian-American to lead an Ivy League institution.
Kim’s nomination is a matter for congratulation for Korea. The Seoul government welcomed Obama’s decision, saying that Kim would prove to be the right person to reform the World Bank.
If Kim takes over the helm of the bank, he may find there is much room for cooperation between his bank and Korea in providing development assistance to emerging nations.
Traditionally, the bank has provided poverty-fighting aid to developing countries. But these nations increasingly demand that the bank help them attain sustained economic growth. Korea can help the bank accommodate this growing demand as it knows how to help impoverished countries come out of poverty through economic growth.
