A better way to pick World Bank presidents

The World Bank's board of directors will meet soon to decide what if anything to do about their president, Paul Wolfowitz, and the steady drumbeat of news lately would appear to indicate that the guy can't hold on much longer. The NYT reports that the Europeans wants a deal where Wolfowitz goes in return for letting the U.S. continue to pick the World Bank president. The FT says his top PR aide, Kevin Kellems, who insisted early on that Wolfowitz had nothing to do with getting his girlfriend a raise, has quit, and another of his appointees, Robin Cleveland, is now implicated in helping craft a "misleading public statement" about the Wolforama.

The Kellems-Cleveland stuff is classic scandal material. It's always the coverup that gets you, not the crime. It's pretty much impossible to characterize what Wolfowitz did as a crime, so if he and his minions had just been consistent and honest and open in discussing it after the fact, there wouldn't be much of a story here. But they weren't.

As for the deal reportedly proposed by the Europeans, I'm not sure it's such a great idea. What needs to happen is for future World Bank presidents to be people that all the bank's big shareholders (basically the U.S., the Western Europeans, and Japan) can get behind. Up to now the custom has been for the U.S. president to make a choice without really consulting anybody else, which more or less guarantees that the World Bank president will face an uphill struggle in trying to make the big changes that the organization needs. The staff's going to be dubious no matter what, and if all you've got backing you up is the 16.4% U.S. vote, you're never going to be able to get much done. Wolfowitz has apparently spent a lot of time courting the Africans, but African countries control only a small percentage of the bank's voting power.

Add together the U.S., Japan and the members of the European Union and you get 53% of the World Bank's votes. These are countries with reasonably similar interests when it comes to development policy, so it ought to be possible to get them all to agree on a president who wouldn't be a total milquetoast. It can remain the custom that the president is an American, but he or she shouldn't be chosen by just the Americans.