WB president’s visit to endorse Nawaz govt reforms

ISLAMABAD: World Bank President Dr Jim Yong Kim, who undertakes a two-visit to Pakistan from Tuesday, will stress upon continuation of reforms, introduced by the Nawaz Sharif government.

“The visit is part of the continuous policy dialogue with the present government,” a senior official told The News.Meanwhile, the director general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is also visiting Pakistan in May.

Dr Kim will hold intensive interaction with Finance Minister Senator Ishaq Dar, who is the main brain behind the massive economic reforms in several spheres.This will be the first visit of a World Bank President to Pakistan in last 10 years, second in last 18 years. This is also the first visit of Dr Kim, who has been in office for four years now.

Previously, he had three meetings with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in past two years. He met him twice in New York and once in Washington.“The visit is an endorsement of the reforms initiated by the current government in various sectors and acknowledgement of macro-economic stability in the fields of growth, foreign-exchange reserves, inflation, tax revenues, investment, fiscal deficit etc., achieved in the last two years.

Dr Kim will have engagements with the chief ministers of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and Balochistan and the KP governor for discussion of programmes in smaller provinces and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). He will also meet representatives of civil society and private sector.

The official said that the key themes and sectors to be covered during the visit include growth, energy, investment, human development, polio, service delivery, climate change, regional connectivity, financial inclusion, gender and displacement.

He noted that there has been unprecedented assistance from the World Bank to Pakistan in the last two years; from the International Development Association (IDA)’s concessional window; some $3 billion including project investments like Dassu, Tarbela 4, and Development Policy Credits in growth and power sectors.

The official pointed out that Pakistan’s access to International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), which had remained suspended for quite some time, has also been restored recently on account of macro-economic stability.

The annual portfolio of the Interntaional Finance Corporation (IFC) in Pakistan has also risen from $300 million to $1 billion annually, he said.

World Bank Country in Pakistan Director Patchamuthu Illangovan has met the finance minister to talk about matters pertaining to foreign investment and development in education and health sectors that would come under discusison during Dr Kim’s visit. Dar appreciated the World Bank’s cooperation in different sectors and expressed the confidence that the upcoming visit of president will give further impetus to economic cooperation.

The official said that in a way the visit was endorsement of troika of the global governance institutions (World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF) and WTO) in Pakistan’s economic policies.

He noted that the successful completion of Extended Fund Facility of IMF followed by the visit of head of World Bank and the expected trip of the WTO chief reflects the trust of Bretton Woods institutions in Pakistan and its future prospects.

Dr Kim, M.D., Ph.D., who became the 12th President of the World Bank Group on July 1, 2012, is a physician and anthropologist and dedicated himself to international development for more than two decades, helping to improve the lives of under-served populations worldwide.

He came to the World Bank after serving as President of Dartmouth College, a pre-eminent centre of higher education that consistently ranks among the top academic institutions in the United States. He is a co-founder of Partners In Health (PIH) and a former director of the HIV/AIDS Department at the World Health Organization (WHO).

As President of Dartmouth – an institution that comprises a liberal arts college and professional schools of medicine, engineering and business, as well as 19 graduate programmes in the arts and sciences, a staff and faculty of 3,300, and a budget of $700 million – Dr. Kim earned praise for reducing a financial deficit without cutting any academic programs.

Dr. Kim also founded the Dartmouth Centre for Health Care Delivery Science, a multidisciplinary institute dedicated to developing new models of health care delivery and achieving better health outcomes at lower costs.

Before assuming the Dartmouth presidency, Dr. Kim held professorships and chaired departments at Harvard Medical School, the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. He also served as director of Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights.

In 1987, Dr. Kim co-founded Partners In Health, a Boston-based non-profit organization now working in poor communities on 4 continents. Challenging previous conventional wisdom that drug-resistance tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS could not be treated in developing countries, PIH successfully tackled these diseases by integrating large-scale treatment programs into community-based primary care.

Born in 1959 in Seoul, South Korea, Dr Kim moved with his family to the United States at the age of five and grew up in Muscatine, Iowa. He graduated with an A.B. magna cum laude from Brown University in 1982. He earned an M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1991 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from Harvard University in 1993.