Emerging Markets: After being in power for 100 days can you say what your three top priorities are?
Jim Yong Kim: In many ways our fundamental mission is inscribed on the walls of the World Bank [building in Washington DC] – our dream is a world free of poverty. The question I have been asking our teams is what can we do to fundamentally change the arc of history in the sense of ending absolute poverty more quickly than it is currently predicted to end. The current predictions are 20 to 25 years. It’s our job to have a catalytic effect on poverty. The good news is that around the institution, the answer has been a very strong yes. That’s why we came to work at the World Bank – we want to fight poverty and we want to make a difference in history. It’s been my life’s work, working in situations of great poverty.
Secondly, the question is how you do this and on that I think the jury is in. In our World Development Report 2013 we were very clear: 90% of all jobs are created in the private sector and everyone in the world wants a good job. Fundamentally every country has to ask itself ‘is the business environment conducive to the kind of growth that creates the good growth that everyone wants?’. We talk about this as shared prosperity and the reason we say is that there is overwhelming evidence that if you have economic growth and young people are not included you have situations like the Arab Spring. So growth in your GDP without inclusion is a fundamentally unstable position.
The third priority is there are fundamental global public goods tat we have to address. Shared prosperity to me means prosperity that is shared with future generations. The consensus around man-made climate change is now absolutely overwhelming. We have to be much more serious about climate change. One of the things that we want to do is to find ways of boosting the market for technologies, interventions that will lead to the mitigation and adaptation of climate change. We really need to get companies and countries to see responsiveness to climate change as a source for future economic growth. I don’t think we are going to get where we want to go simply by asking people to change their behaviour. If we can move the world economy in that direction we will both be pro-growth and tackle one of these critical issues. We are living in a 0.8 degree world but we are 0.8 degrees warmer than historical averages but in 30 or 40 years’ time it is very likely that we will be in a 2 degrees world – 2 degrees warmer. That means that my three-year-old son when he is my age is going to be living in a completely different world than we live in now.
EM: That’s a big list. Are you confident you have the resources given that may take you away from some of the income-earning investment? Or will you need an IDA-style refinancing from the public sector?
JYK: Right now, because of the current climate, we are not having discussions on capital adequacy. We had a very generous capital increase right before I took over the job. So right now we are not having the discussion about needing more money. I think though that the discussion that we need to have is that we need to make some choices. We are going to have some choices about things that we do more of and things that we do less of and I am willing to have that discussion.
EM: Looking to the end of your term, can you be specific about the achievements and targets you can set now that you would be prepared to be judged against?
JYK: The most important thing that I would like to be judged on is: have we been clear enough about the fundamental mission of the organization? Have we realigned our structures to reflect that fundamental mission statement? I took the job because I have been trying to fight poverty my entire life. We are not going to have ended it in five years but I would like the board to be able to say ‘you really made the changes and those changes were good. Now we can see that this organisation is deadly serious about boosting prosperity and reducing poverty and you are tackling some of the most difficult issues like climate change that we can embrace’. At that point if I have done that I hope that perhaps that despite my nationality they would want me to do this job. If the World Bank is hitting on all cylinders and if we are organised in a way in which we are really going to tackle poverty and help each country become more competitive and boost prosperity and if we are at our very best then I am absolutely sure we can bend the arc of history.