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| World
Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim |
(Being World
Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim’s speech at the U.S. Global Leadership
Coalition Annual Conference on June 25th, 2013 in Washington DC, USA)
Good afternoon,
everybody. It’s a wonderful honor to be here. Thank you, Ann for
that great introduction and I just want you to know it’s a true pleasure to be
here at the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition’s annual conference.
I accepted the invitation to
speak at this year’s conference because of the critical role that so many of
you play in improving the lives of the poorest people in the world. This
conference brought together one of the most diverse coalitions in the
international policy arena, from leaders in the business, NGO, and faith-based
communities to scholars and national security experts. You have the
breadth and depth of experience needed to tackle complex challenges.
The challenges are daunting,
indeed, but today, and really I want to stress this, for the first time in
human history we have an opportunity.
You know, Ann mentioned that we
have two goals and it took a lot of work and time to get our board of
governors, and the board of governors of the World Bank Group are development
ministers, but mostly ministers of finance from 188 different countries.
And so, for this particular
group, who is in charge of very practical decisions about, you know, how to
distribute -- how to organize a budget, how to make sure that their own
countries are growing economically, these really very busy people came together
and gave us a great gift, and the gift was these two goals. The first is
to end poverty by 2030, and what we mean by that is that we want to get the
rates of poverty down below 3 percent. And the reason we picked that 3
percent number is that we looked and looked and looked at what we think is
going to happen naturally.
So, if we keep at more or less
the same rates of growth, the projection is it will be to between 6 and 9
percent poverty by 2030, and we’ve looked hard at that, and the reason that the
rate of reduction of poverty would slow down a little bit is because many of
the low-hanging fruit have been picked. So much of the success over the
last couple of decades has been as a result of China’s rapid economic
growth. The Chinese lifted 600 million people out of poverty, which has
never been done before. This is the first time in human history.
And so, now we have South Asia,
we have Sub-Saharan Africa, we have many of the so-called fragile and conflict
affected states left. So, to get the poverty rate below 3 percent is
going to be a huge task. We refer to it as trying to bend the arc of
history by actually pulling that poverty rate down below 3 percent. Once
it gets to 3 percent, it’s fairly clear that the nature of the struggle against
poverty will change, in other words, major structural investments, the growth
of the private sector, these are all going to be critical for bringing poverty
down, but at 3 percent, it’s going to be really what the economists call
frictional poverty, poverty that happens as a result of extreme weather events,
for example, poverty that happens as a result of disasters, poverty that
happens as a result of famine, things that are difficult to control and that
we’ll have to respond to on a case-by-case basis.
But we think we can bring it
down below 3 percent.
The other goal is to boost the
incomes of the bottom 40 percent. This is the first time in history that
the World Bank Group is going to publish every single year the extent to which
the bottom 40 percent of any country is participating in economic
growth. Now, there’s two messages here, the first is that economic
growth is critical, and economic growth, especially in the private sector, is
critical.
On the other hand, what we know
-- and, you know, the events of the last few weeks have made it even clearer --
what we know is that if you don’t include the bottom 40 percent, if you don’t
include women, if you don’t include young people in that economic growth, you
are building instability into your societies, even countries that have been
doing so well in terms of sharing the fruits of growth, like Brazil, are now
experiencing demonstrations that I don’t think will go away.
What did we learn from the Arab
Spring? You can have growth in your GDP, but if it’s not inclusive, and
if it’s not inclusive especially of young people, you’re going to have these
kinds of demonstrations, because now, one of the great things about the new age
is that people will be heard, people will make their voices heard.
And so, end extreme poverty,
boost shared prosperity, and moreover, when we talk about boosting shared
prosperity, we’re talking specifically about sharing prosperity with future
generations.
Many of you may know, we’ve
made a tremendous effort over the past year to increase the World Bank Group’s
commitment to tackling climate change. We think this is absolutely a
critical part of trying to fight extreme poverty. There’s no way that we
will be able to end extreme poverty unless we tackle climate change.
Now, let me just give you a
little bit of perspective. First of all, so many of you in this room have
fought hard for increases in foreign assistance and I can’t thank you enough
for having done that. It’s critical. Foreign assistance is
absolutely critical, has made a huge difference in the world. Anyone who
doubts that, please come talk to me and anyone else who’s been the beneficiary
of foreign assistance for such a long time.
But if you look at the numbers
today, total Official Development Assistance, the total package is about $125
billion. Now, that $125 billion is critical, but look at it compared to
the needs in the world today. So, in Africa alone, every year there’s
about a $95 billion a year need for funding for infrastructure, and that’s
Sub-Saharan Africa by itself.
If you look at India, in my
trip there, the Minister of Finance kept stressing to me, India has a $1
trillion infrastructure deficit over the next five years, so on average, about
$200 billion a year. So, all of ODA can’t even meet India’s need for
infrastructure for one year. All of ODA will cover the need of
Sub-Saharan Africa in infrastructure for one year. And guess what it is
that these countries want? They want energy, they want roads, they want
an environment that will lure private sector investment so they can create
jobs.
Now, some people have asked me
-- and I have been talking a lot about the private sector. In fact, the
last few months, I’ve been traveling to countries like Japan and Canada, very
explicitly saying that the private sector needs to get in the game and help us
achieve our development goals while at the same time making money. You
know, there is something like $5 trillion sitting on the sidelines these days
earning very low interest rates, and what we know is that 90 percent of all
jobs in the world are created by the private sector. This came out in our
World Development Report of 2013.
So, when people -- friends from
my past life of working in some of the smallest communities, when they ask me
why is it that you’re talking so much about the private sector, I say that, you
know, it has nothing to do with whether or not I like or don’t like the private
sector, whether anyone likes or doesn’t like the private sector.
Fundamentally, it has to do with your aspirations for poor people.
If you think that all of
development assistance is how we divide up ODA, then poor people are in big
trouble. A hundred and twenty-five billion dollars is so critical
because that money is going to pay for the kind of investments that no other
source of financing will pay for. We need it and we need it to grow and
we need your help in making sure it grows.
But what we also need to do is
to make sure that every penny of foreign assistance, every penny of ODA that
exists, is used to leverage, first, domestic resources, I mean, you know, many
countries are getting better at collecting taxes and having a real foundation
for making their own investments in infrastructure, but even more importantly,
we’ve got to find a way of leveraging these precious ODA dollars to leverage
private sector investment.
We’re trying to do that very
directly within the World Bank Group. As some of you may know, we call it
the World Bank Group because there’s one part, the public sector part, IBRD,
the original
International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, which is
our so-called market rate lending to lots of middle income countries, mostly
middle income countries, and then we have our concessional loan window IDA, the
International Development Association, that provides zero interest rates and
grants to the poorest countries.
But we also have IFC, the
International Finance Corporation, our private sector wing, and it started from
a relatively small operation to now it’s about a $20 billion a year operation,
which is 40 percent of our overall operation. We also have another group
called MIGA, the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency that provides
political risk assurance for investors who are investing even in the most
fragile countries.
And just to give you a sense of
how we’re doing, now, IFC, the International Finance Corporation, makes equity
investments directly into some of the poorest countries in the world, and over
the last 15 years, including over the last five years, the average internal
rate of return on our equity investments has been 20 percent.
Now, we have been able to make
a good return on our equity investments while at the same time advancing the
development aims of the countries, the companies, the regions that we invest
in, and this is going to be the key to ending poverty.
Now, you might say, well, but
what about countries like Liberia? Here’s a country, a small country,
racked with a long history, decades of war. I had a long conversation
with President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf when I was in Tokyo for the Tokyo
International Conference on African Development, and that meeting itself was
really quite striking. You know, we had something like 50 heads of state
from Africa together with the Prime Minister of Japan, and we spent three days
together talking about what’s going on in Africa.
And, interestingly, as they
were walking through the door, my vice-president for Africa said to me, it’s
amazing, because the last Tokyo International Conference in African Development
was five years ago in 2008, and in 2008, everyone was saying to themselves, in
the developed world, oh, my goodness, the financial crisis, what is going to
happen to Africa? These countries are going to be in such trouble.
But as they were walking through the door in 2013, average rate of growth over
the last five years was over 5 percent, not a single African country was
experiencing hyper-inflation, their debt-to-GDP ratio was a lot better than a
lot of countries in Europe. They were confident as they walked in the
door.
So, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said
to me, look, we need energy. She had been in power for about seven years,
but she said, we have been out of war for over a decade and still, to this day,
we have 21 megawatts of installed capacity, about enough for a couple of city
blocks here in Washington, DC.
And she said, if we don’t have energy,
we’re not going to get the private sector investment we need and we’re not
going to be able to create the jobs that I desperately need for my young
people, some of them -- she said, I have young men who are over 30 years old
who have done nothing their entire lives except be soldiers. What do I do
with those young men to ensure that they don’t pick up their arms again?
What they need is energy, private sector investment, and jobs.
And so, we now are doing our
best to move quickly and increase a really pitiful amount of energy. And
moreover, let me tell you, not only does she only have 21 megawatts of
installed capacity, she pays 54 cents a kilowatt hour, which is four or five
times what we pay here in Washington, DC.
So, the message from the
African leaders was clear, yes, we need your aid, but please, when you come to
our countries, listen to our priorities. What we want is strategic
investments that lead to our ability then to use whatever tax base we have to
build, for example, healthcare systems that are going to sustain themselves,
because people have jobs and can participate in insurance programs. More
than anything else, we need jobs. We need jobs and we need to keep, in
many cases, former combatants off the battlefield.
Now, so that’s one part of my
message. We need private sector investment and we need to do this in
close cooperation with every single dollar of Official Development Assistance
that’s going into these countries.
The second thing that I’d like
to raise, though, to you, is that when it comes to issues like ending poverty
and battling climate change, we need social movements. I’ve had the great
good fortune of being part of some social movements. Let me just tell you
about one and why I think that a truly well thought out, rigorous, committed
social movement has the greatest capacity to transform the world and help us
reach our aspirations around things like poverty and battling climate change.
You know, we all know that the
last decade in the AIDS world has just seen an unbelievable
transformation. We’ve gone from, in 10 years, from about 50,000 people in
treatment in development countries to over nine million today. Nine
million people who would have been dead.
Now, what would have happened
to the African economy if those nine million people or so, in Africa, were
dead? What would have happened if no one was getting tested? What
would have happened for people living with HIV there was no hope? I
actually think the economic performance would not have been this good and that
we would have been wondering, my goodness, what did we just let happen?
But now this has happened.
But I want to tell you a little
bit about the story of how it happened. It was a small group of committed
souls who made this happen. It was people who were willing to risk their
lives, go into the National Institutes of Health, for example, throw blood on
researchers and say, you need to focus on AIDS research. That
happened. Then they said, once we have promising molecules, we need to
make sure that it moves quickly from research laboratory into private sector
companies. And then once promising molecules were coming out of the
private sector companies, they worked to reduce the time it takes to get a drug
through the Food and Drug Administration from 27 months, that’s the fast track,
to six months.
And this was done by people who
had no specialization in those areas. You know, one of the people, Mark
Harrington, a very good friend of mine, he was a very smart guy, he graduated
from Harvard, he was involved in Act-Up, the movement to tackle HIV. He became
an expert on the Food and Drug Administration, found out about all their rules
and regulations, because he knew that in order for him and his friends to live,
they needed to shrink the number of months it took to get a drug through the
FDA.
After that, after the drugs got
through the FDA, then they started saying, well, now that we have these drugs,
we’re not going to let them only be available for people who have money, so now
we’re going to work on making sure that everyone in the world has access to
these drugs, and everything from having Medecins Sans Frontieres reduce the
first prices, President Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative brought the
price down to $70 a year for HIV drugs.
The point is that with the
public sector, with activists, with the private sector, all of them brought
together, went from a brand new disease in 1981, to effective treatment in ’96,
and today in 2013, to the people -- nine million people in the poorest
countries in the world, one of the most effective social movements ever.
And so, when I talk to people
about poverty or climate change, I keep asking the question, have we done all
the work we need to build a social movement that will stretch across the entire
value chain, to use a word from business, that we need to tackle in order to
get the results we want? And I would argue, and I think most people would
agree, that today we don’t have that for climate change and we don’t have that
yet for ending poverty.
But for the NGO representatives
in the room, what would it take to build a movement to end poverty? What
would it take to build a movement to tackle climate change so we have any hope
of ending poverty?
Well, I’m here today to give
you my personal message of enormous optimism of hope that we can actually make it
happen. Today, and perhaps right at this moment, President Obama is
giving a speech on U.S. efforts to tackle climate change. We have the
declaration of 188 ministers of finance and ministers of development that we
are going to end poverty; that we’re going to put everything we have to ending
poverty on this earth in a generation by 2030. You know, the only way
that that will happen is if we all get past the suspicions we have of each
other. You know, one of the most important things that I’ve tried to
communicate to my team is that we are one small part of a much bigger plan to
tackle poverty, to tackle climate change, to boost shared prosperity for the
poorest 40 percent, and that we’ve got to find ways to work together.
Just a couple of months I flew
-- I went to the Great Lakes region. We visited the Democratic Republic
of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda. It was led by the Secretary-General of the
United Nations and me. And I didn’t know this, but the Secretary-General
told me that our trip together was the first time in history that the
Secretary-General of the United Nations and the President of the World Bank
went on a mission together. I said, but I’ve seen pictures of them
together before. It turns out that when disasters happen, they happen to show
up at the same place and take pictures together, but they never went on mission
together because to go on mission together, you’ve got to negotiate who’s going
where, who’s going to take the first picture, all those kinds of things.
And it’s been so hard over such a long time that no one’s done it. And so
I think both the Secretary-General and I gave instructions to our teams to just
lose arguments, lose more arguments than you’re used to, and we got it
done. And we were able to put one billion additional dollars on the
table. The Secretary-General was able to reinforce the peace framework
that he had established several months before, and it was so helpful we’re
going to do it again and again. But I remember what it was like on the
ground when I was one of the mice when the elephants were fighting with each
other, when the U.N. and the World Bank didn’t work so well together. And
you can extend that all to when NGOs and the private sector were fighting.
Look, we have a chance to
eliminate poverty from the face of the earth, extreme poverty from the face of
the earth, in a generation. I hope that all of you in this room today
will commit to that in whatever way that you can contribute. And think
about what it will be like. Now, for me, it’s very real. I’m very
involved -- the World Bank is involved in energy, agriculture, so many other
things. And for me specifically the climate change issue is very, very
real. I can just hear my 13-year-old and 4-year-old sons in about 20 years
when they’re living in a 2 degree Celsius warmer world, where there are water
fights and food fights every day, where there are extreme weather events
happening all over the world on a regular basis. In that time my kids are
going to look at me and say Dad, what the hell were you doing when you were
President of the World Bank? And by that time if the number of people
living in absolute poverty increases, they’re going to ask me even harder
questions. So we have a chance. We have a chance to leave something
for our children and for our grandchildren that will be truly inspiring, but it
won’t happen unless everyone in this room decides today that the ultimate goal
is far more important than raising the flag for our single organizations.
Thank you very much.
