Reshaping the World Bank for the 21st Century:An Agenda for the New President

The Institute for International Economic Policy was pleased to host a distinguished panel comprising Nancy Birdsall (Center for Global Development), Ana Palacio (Palacio y Asociados and Georgetown), and Johannes Linn (Brookings) on April 26, 2023. The panel discussed "Reshaping the World Bank for the 21st Century: An Agenda for the New President" in a session moderated by IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber.

With the nomination of Ajay Banga by the US administration as the next World Bank president there is a unique opportunity to reshape the institution for the needs of the 21st century. This would include changing its strategic direction with a much greater focus on tackling climate change, as it pursues poverty eradication and shared prosperity. It must also include making its governance structure more representative of a changed global economic landscape and using its capital in more innovative ways to harness the vast sums of private capital to meet the challenges of sustainable development across the world. It must also find ways to focus more on global public goods as it helps individual countries address these challenges.