Josh Boak
Politico
3/23/2012
President Barack Obama nominated Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim as the new president of the World Bank.
Citing Kim’s record working on international health in the Rose Garden Friday, Obama said, “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”
Kim, a trained medical doctor who has led the Ivy League college since 2009, will replace Robert Zoellick, whose term ends June 30.
“Despite its name, the World Bank is more than just a bank—it’s one of the most powerful tools we have to reduce poverty and raise standards of living in some of the poorest countries in the planet,” Obama said. “Jim has truly global experience. He’s worked from Asia to Africa to the Americas, from capitals to small villages.”
Though the board of the World Bank will officially decide on the next president over the next three weeks, the president’s nomination effectively guarantees Kim the post as the new head of the prestigious 187-nation lending organization focused on economic development…
…Not everyone cheered the surprise nomination of a physician instead of an economist with strong government connections.
“This was really a surprise and not a good one,”said Anders Aslund, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “One question is whether such an apparently substandard candidate can really be appointed. This reminds of when George W. Bush tried to appoint Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.”…
The entire article is at Politico.com
Update: Via Wikipedia:
…Over the past few years, Kim has been involved in the development of a new field focused on improving the implementation and delivery of global health interventions. He believes that progress in developing more effective global health programs has been hindered by the paucity of large-scale systematic approaches to improving program design. This new field will rigorously gather, analyze, and widely disseminate a comprehensive body of practical, actionable insights on effective global health delivery. In order to develop this field, Kim co-founded the Global Health Delivery Project, a joint initiative of Harvard Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine and the Harvard Business School’s Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness. The global health field case studies produced by this project form the core of a new global health delivery curriculum now taught at Harvard School of Public Health. Kim’s team has also developed a web-based “community of practice”, GHDonline.org, to allow practitioners around the world to easily access information, share expertise, and engage in real-time problem solving. Kim is on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal.
Time at Dartmouth
Kim’s tenure as president at Dartmouth has been marked by intense criticism. The student body has frequently reported being disillusioned with Kim after his failure to address any major campus issues. His list of failures include refusing to release the college’s budget, failure to conduct a safety report of the college river docks, declining requests to attend a public debate, a 41% increase in liquor law violations since his inauguration, an 113% increase in sexual assaults since his inauguration,spending $40,000,000 on a hotel renovation with a projected cost of $21.5 million, and failure to address an ongoing hazing scandal…
He sounds just perfect to head the World Bank…
Update 2: Is the President’s New World Bank Nominee Connected to Soros?
…during an interview on “The Charlie Rose Show,” Kim was asked what he considered to be the high point of his career. He responded [emphasis added]: “The high point was when we started receiving support, first from George Soros who gave us our first grants [to battle tuberculosis] and then we received a huge grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”
And by “we,” he means Partners in Health…
