IMF Process Stinks but Lagarde Scores Well on CGD Survey

The IMF announced today that French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde has been chosen as the new managing director—the first woman to lead the institution in a selection process that for the first time had an element of competition.With the selection process complete, we have closed the CGD IMF leadership selection survey, which in the past few weeks attracted nearly 800 responses from people in about 50 countries. My colleague David Wheeler is analyzing the numbers and will provide a careful analysis of the results in the next few weeks. In the meantime, here’s a quick back-of-the envelope summary of a few of the key takeaways (with thanks to colleagues Jonathan Karver and Will McKitterick for crunching the numbers and helping to manage the survey).Not surprisingly, there is overwhelming dissatisfaction among respondents with the current selection system. Almost 70 percent of respondents agreed with this statement:

The traditional European prerogative to name the head of the IMF and the U.S. prerogative to name the World Bank president should be replaced by a selection process that is open, competitive and merit-based, without regard to nationality.

On the other hand, Lagarde was clearly viewed as a strong candidate among the 16 potential candidates listed on our survey (names were drawn from press reports early in the process, when the field was still seen as possibly open).The majority of survey respondents who ranked Lagarde on the survey’s six qualification criteria viewed her as either “good” or “excellent.” Lagarde ranked among the top four candidates in five of the six criteria:

• She came in 2nd place for high-level political and diplomatic experience, and the quality of being an effective manager
• She came in 3rd place when considering private sector banking and finance experience, and an understanding of international monetary and capital market issues
• She came in 6th place when comparing high-level international organization experience

You can view the survey results here. For reflections on the potential for leadership selection reform, see this post by my colleague Arvind Subramanian. I hope Lagarde proves him wrong.