Jim Kim – World Bank – anti-growth agenda?

Editor’s Note – By now, it is so obvious, Obama does not want America to succeed. Latest example – Jim Yong Kim, a very well-educated man nominated as the next head of the World Bank. here is a brief bio:

Korean-American physicianand 17th President of Dartmouth College. He was formerly the Chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and was a co-founder and executive director of Partners in Health. On March 2, 2009, Kim was named as the president of Dartmouth College, a position he formally assumed on July 1, 2009. Kim is the first Asian-American to assume the post of president at an Ivy League institution.

His merits are among some of the finest, that is, until you see how he thinks, and what his status as the President of the World Bank will mean to our economy, the world economy, and now, a charge to establish one world-currency. Not the current world reserve currency, the Dollar, but something else.

Read some snippets here on what he has to say.

US World Bank nominee under fire over book

By Robin Harding in Washington, Financial Times

Jim Yong Kim, the US nominee to head the World Bank, is coming under fire over a book he co-authored which criticises “neoliberalism” and “corporate-led economic growth”, arguing that in many cases they had made the middle classes and the poor in developing countries worse off.

US Nominee to head the World Bank, Jim Yong Kim and Obama

Some economists are arguing that Dying for Growth, jointly edited by Dr Kim and published in 2000, puts too great a focus on health policy over broader economic growth.

Dr Kim would be the first World Bank president ever who seems to be anti-growth,” said William Easterly, professor of economics at New York University. “Even the severest of World Bank critics like me think that economic growth is what we want.”

Dr Kim, who is president of Dartmouth College and a former head of the HIV/Aids programme at the World Health Organisation, was a surprise pick for the top job at the World Bank, which traditionally goes to a US citizen.

Dying For Growth: Global Inequality and the Health of the Poor by Jim Yong Kim

Little is known about his views on economic policy because his background is in health. But if he cannot set out a strong vision for how the World Bank will fuel growth, it may boost the campaigns of heavyweight rivals such as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian finance minister and former World Bank managing director.

Dr Kim’s book contains several inflammatory lines. For example, the introduction, which he and two other academics co-authored, says: “The studies in this book present evidence that the quest for growth in GDP and corporate profits has in fact worsened the lives of millions of women and men.”

But colleagues of Dr Kim and officials at the US Treasury said that when taken in context he was simply arguing that the distribution of gains from economic growth decides whether it makes life better for the poorest. They pointed out that such criticisms were widespread in the late 1990s and the World Bank had since changed its practices to take account of them.

“Jim Kim is a brilliant man and fully understands the need for economic growth. What we have said in the book is that economic growth, in and of itself, is insufficient and will not automatically lead to a better life for everyone,” said Joyce Millen, one of the co-editors of Dying for Growth, and associate professor of anthropology at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

The legal charter of the International Development Agency, the part of the World Bank group dedicated to helping the poorest countries, says that its purpose is “to promote economic development, increase productivity and thus raise standards of living in the less-developed areas of the world”.

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