Read my lips, says Jim Wolfensohn
World Bank turns to guarantees
Seven-point plan to save the world
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| Wolfensohn: low tolerance for criticism |
Complex and mercurial, Jim Wolfensohn exudes a passion for the job. He considers his half-decade at the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, more simply known as the World Bank, to be the most important task that he has tackled.
Wolfensohn has described his presidential role as a high-wire act of sorts. He's not been content to settle for a Bank which pushes countries into policies designed only to produce growth. Development, in his eyes, involves far more than that. He wants staff to think in more "human" terms.
"I am absolutely convinced that for the future it has to be a partnership of interests between the financial and macro and the social and structural."
The task is daunting. Dire poverty remains the lot of multitudes 40 years after the International Development Association (IDA) was set up as a World Bank affiliate to assist the poorest countries. "If that's the most celebrated initiative to usher in the new millennium," says Jessica Einhorn, a former managing director at the Bank, "we'd better have some humility about the complexity and challenge of this enterprise."