Arvind Subramanian was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article on the IMF.
From the Article
Empires do not succumb quietly. Old powers do not readily surrender prerogatives. Rising ones do not wield clout with agility.
"Global shifts have almost always fanned economic conflict, created problems for economic management and heightened diplomatic tensions," economic historian Barry Eichengreen of the University of California at Berkeley recently told a Bank of Finland symposium. Sometimes, they have erupted in military conflict; often, they show in tensions in international economics and finance.
In this context, the tension over Dominique Strauss-Kahn's successor as managing director of the International Monetary Fund is more than a tug of war over whose national gets a top post at the multinational lender.
It is the creaking of global institutions created in 1945 and not yet adjusted to the weight of emerging markets, a sign of the reluctant acquiescence of the U.S. and Europe to a world they no longer dominate, a manifestation of the unease in China that management of its domestic economy matters to the rest of the world. It is a minor milestone in what a World Bank report this week called "multipolarity," a world with more than one or two economic powerhouses.
For nearly 60 years, the IMF job has been reserved for a European and the top World Bank job for an American—an archaic, if not illegitimate, tradition.
"Europe no longer has the divine right to this job," Arvind Subramanian and Nicolas Véron of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a Washington think tank, wrote this week. "The world has changed, and antiquated if unstated arrangements dating from 1945…must keep pace with reality." The next managing director of the IMF, they said, must be chosen on merit, "which is not to be found only in Europe."