CGD's president, Nancy Birdsall, will participate on a panel as part of the Williams College Center for Development Economics's two-day conference, "The Future of the World Bank and the IMF: Redesign For a New (and Old) World"
What Kind of World Bank in the 21st Century?
Thursday, September 27, 2012
4:00pm - 5:30pm
Featuring
Nancy Birdsall
President, The Center for Global Development
Visiting Professor, Williams College
Ishrat Husain
Dean and Director, Institute of Business Administration in Karachi
Formerly, Governor, State Bank of Pakistan
Robert Wade
Professor of Political Economy and Development, London School of Economics
Chair
Marco Gerard Caprio
William Brough Professor of Economics, Williams College
The panelists will attempt to answer the following questions:
- Should the Bank be encouraging and subsidizing global public goods – on climate change, drug resistance, or less risky financial systems that blow up and damage others, for example -- and therefore focusing less on individual countries?
- Rather than lending, should the Bank become more of a knowledge bank: creating knowledge public goods, subsidizing research on and in developing countries?
- What role for the Bank in encouraging better governance in developing countries, given the evidence (Why Nations Fail) that governance is critical? And what about improving its own governance?
- What role for the Bank in the shrinking number of low-income countries?
The conference overall will explore the themes that are critical to the future effectiveness of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), notably financial crises and regulation, poverty, and climate change, as well as the changing governance of the institutions themselves.
