Jim Kim faces BRICS bank questions
With the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund picking up steam, Bank president Jim Kim faced the international press today. He was asked several times about the possibility that the Bank will face competition from a planned new BRICS bank. Kim insisted first that there’s plenty of room for all sorts ...
With the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund picking up steam, Bank president Jim Kim faced the international press today. He was asked several times about the possibility that the Bank will face competition from a planned new BRICS bank. Kim insisted first that there's plenty of room for all sorts of lending:
With the spring meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund picking up steam, Bank president Jim Kim faced the international press today. He was asked several times about the possibility that the Bank will face competition from a planned new BRICS bank. Kim insisted first that there’s plenty of room for all sorts of lending:
[E]very single one of the BRICS countries has an enormous infrastructure deficit that simply can’t be met by a single institution, certainly not the World Bank in and of itself. So, for us, the BRICS Bank is quite a natural extension of the need for more investment in infrastructure, and so we would welcome it.
But he also maintained that the Bank has unique expertise:
I would point out that the World Bank has been around for 66 years. We have 66 years of experience in building infrastructure. We have knowledge that cuts across all that have been developed to working with all 188 member countries. And so our sense is that whatever other banks are built, one, there is plenty of infrastructure that needs to go around, and our sense is that they would want to take advantage of the knowledge that we have.
Kim also rejected any idea that the World Bank may be declining in relevance:
I really have no doubt in my own mind about our continued relevance for a very long time. In fact, that’s precisely the news that I’m getting back from every single one of the BRICS countries. There is an increasing request for our involvement, not a decreasing sense of demand for our environment of our services.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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