World Bank welcomes new president
Washington-nominated Jim Yong Kim was selected as the World Bank Group's president for a five-year term beginning on July 1, 2012.
Under his new capacity, Kim will chair the Boards of Directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA). He is also ex officio Chair of the Boards of Directors of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the Administrative Council of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).
“I would like to congratulate Jim Yong Kim for his appointment as President of the World Bank Group. He brings an impressive record of experience, commitment, and leadership on development issues to the Bank. I very much look forward to working with him and in further advancing the strong collaboration between our institutions,” Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The announcement was made on April 16, after the meeting of World Bank's executive directors who expressed deep gratitude to the former president, Robert B. Zoellick, for his outstanding leadership and dedication to reducing poverty in its member countries, the core mandate of the World Bank Group.
Kim went under the new selection process agreed in 2011 which, for the first time in the bank’s history, yielded multiple nominees. He won the race which covered two other candidates - José Antonio Ocampo and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. The former was the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and former finance minister of Columbia, while the latter is a globally renowned Nigerian economist best known for her two terms as Finance Minister of Nigeria is a globally renowned Nigerian economist best known for her two terms as Finance Minister of Nigeria.
According to World Bank's statement, Kim is currently president of Dartmouth College. A US national, Kim is a co-founder of Partners in Health (PIH) and a former director of the Department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organisation (WHO). Before assuming the Dartmouth presidency, Kim held professorships at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Public Health. He also served as chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and director of the François Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health.
He was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship (2003), was named one of America’s “25 Best Leaders” by US News & World Report (2005), and was selected as one of TIME magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” (2006). He was elected in 2004 to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences—one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine—for his professional achievements and commitment to service. He has published widely over the past two decades, authoring or co-authoring articles for leading academic and scientific journals, including the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Science.
Born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, Kim moved with his family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. He graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982. He earned a medical doctorate from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1993. He is married to Dr. Younsook Lim, a pediatrician.
