Korean by birth, American citizen and doctor, Jim Yong Kim is the new president of the World Bank. The South Korean-born doctor is 52 years old and will succeed the current president of the Washington institute, Robert Zoellick. It is a bitter pill for i Emerging countries and the BRICS who instead supported the Nigerian Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and which aimed to break the usual US-EU dualism at the top of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
But Jim Yong Kim brings with him an important air of renewal. The new President, in his first interview with the BBC, underlined the need to aim at the “growth of the market economy”, a priority for any country that wants to create jobs and eliminate poverty. But it also announced plans to hold taking into careful consideration the cultural and social peculiarities of the regions, to ensure that the different programs of the World Bank are successful: "If we focus on what works and adapt it to the local context I believe we will be successful".
These phrases are the reflection of a fundamental change that has been characterizing the development projects of the Institute in recent years, which speaks more and more of a different development, linked not only to the improvement of economic situations, but also of social, cultural and human ones.
Kim is a scientist, not an economist. He grew up in Iowa, and at a young age became manager of one of the most prestigious US universities, Darthmouth College; he headed the World Health Organization (WHO) department for the fight against AIDS; he founded 'Partners for Health', a non-profit committed to the fight against infectious diseases (TB, in particular) in the poorest countries.
An academic, a physicist, with a medical degree and a doctorate in anthropology, Kim acknowledged that he did not possess the political know-how for such an assignment, but "I am a doctor," he declared, "the doctors work on the elements, rather than committing themselves to a single ideology, to a particular point of view”. AND when it comes to development, the experiences of the natives must never be underestimated: the transmission of knowledge or a technique must not be an imposition but rather the result of a fruitful dialogue with the populations themselves.
