Letters to The Editor: Discard Dysfunctional System of Selecting Bank President (Financial Times)

The following letter from CGD president Nancy Birdsall was published in Financial Times

Sir, You suggest that Paul Wolfowitz be told to resign the presidency of the World Bank ("Wolfowitz must be told to resign now", editorial, April 13). Whatever happens, the World Bank's leadership crisis should be the final nail in the coffin of the anachronistic and dysfunctional custom of allowing the US to appoint single-handedly the head of the world's most important development institution.

The members of the bank's "development committee" - the finance and development ministers who converged in Washington last weekend for the bank's spring shareholders' meeting - should have been focusing their attention on the complex and urgent challenges of the first half of the 21st century: growing inequality, the persistence of extreme poverty, epidemic diseases and the spectre of rapid climate change. Instead they have no doubt been preoccupied with the fate of the president himself.

There is an up side to this crisis. It makes clear that the time has come to discard the outmoded custom that gives the US the sole right to nominate the World Bank president. From the beginning of his term, Paul Wolfowitz has been handicapped by the illegitimacy of a non-transparent process based not on merit but on 20th-century politics and power. The 20th should now give way to the 21st century, and to an open, competitive, merit-based selection process. If the US will not yield, it is surely time for the Europeans, finally, to push, and for Brazil, Russia, India, China and the other rising emerging market economies to weigh in too.