World Bank president James Wolfensohn, talking to Euromoney's James
Smalhout, responds to the many criticisms being thrown at the
institution, points to some of its recent achievements and outlines
a vision of how it might work in future.
How do you respond to secretary of the Treasury Paul
O'Neill's statement in his speech last June to the Detroit Economic
Club that the world hasn't gotten enough, in terms of poverty
reduction, for the funding that it has made available to the World
Bank?
I think that, if you take the last decade, we've had some
substantial improvements. The proportion of people living in
poverty has been reduced from 29% to 24%. We've seen advances in
terms of education, the rights of women and infant mortality.
Indeed, Larry Summers once said that we've had more achievements in
terms of development in the last 50 years than in the rest of human
history. There have been...
