International Herald Tribune Editorial: Making a better choice for World Bank president

International Herald Tribune Editorial: Making a better choice for World Bank president
Copyright by The International Herald Tribune
Published: May 20, 2007

For decades, the World Bank has lectured borrowers on the virtues of competitive bidding, merit selection, and transparent procedures.

Yet when it has come to choosing the bank's leadership, Washington has never accepted those principles.

Custom gives U.S. presidents the power to award the World Bank presidency to any American - whether or not they have appropriate managerial skills or development credentials. European leaders exercise patronage authority over the top job at the International Monetary Fund.

That deeply flawed selection process produced the Paul Wolfowitz debacle. It is offensive not only for its hypocrisy, but because it has long made the bank a less effective and credible vehicle for financing international development than it should be. It ought to be reformed now, before Wolfowitz's successor is chosen. The ground rules should be changed to require merit selection and open up the job to highly qualified applicants worldwide.

Unfortunately, that is not likely to happen. As part of the backroom negotiations that won over the White House and Wolfowitz to the idea of a resignation, the bank's directors signaled that they would let President George W. Bush decide who would fill out the three years left in the current presidential term.

Bush needs to choose more carefully than he did last time. He needs a high-quality nominee to raise the funds the bank will soon need from Congress and European donor nations, to rebuild battered staff morale, and, most important, to pursue a coherent development and anticorruption agenda.

Two plausible candidates now reportedly under consideration are Robert Zoellick, the former deputy secretary of state who is now a Goldman Sachs managing director, and Robert Kimmitt, deputy secretary of the Treasury.

A bolder choice would be Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official who holds American, as well as Afghan citizenship. Ghani did an impressive job as Afghanistan's finance minister a few years back.

That would allow Bush to choose an American while also getting someone with firsthand experience in the developing world.