WASHINGTON — The White House on Friday named Jim Yong Kim, the president of Dartmouth College and a global health expert, as its nominee to lead the World Bank.
That makes Kim the front-runner to take the helm of the multinational development institution June 30, when its current president, Robert Zoellick, will step down at the end of his five-year term. Tradition has held that Washington selects the head of the World Bank and Europe the leader of its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund, since they were founded during World War II.
Zoellick announced his plans to move on last month.
Highly respected among aid experts, Kim is an anthropologist and a physician who co-founded Partners in Health, a nonprofit that pro- vides health care for the poor, and a former director of the department of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization.
“The leader of the World Bank should have a deep understanding of both the role that development plays in the world and the importance of creating conditions where assistance is no longer needed,” President Barack Obama said Friday. “It’s time for a development professional to lead the world’s largest development agency.”
In a statement, Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary and an alumnus of Dartmouth, praised Kim: “Development is his lifetime commitment, and it is his passion. And in a world with so much potential to improve living standards, we have a unique opportunity to harness that passion and experience at the helm of the World Bank.”
Kim, who was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship in 2003, was born in Seoul, South Korea, in 1959 and moved with his family to the United States when he was 5. He graduated from Brown University in 1982, earned an M.D. from Harvard University in 1991 and received a Ph.D. in anthropology there in 1993.
He was the first Asian-American to head an Ivy League institution when he took the Dartmouth post in 2009.
While working with Partners in Health in Lima, Peru, in the mid-1990s, Kim helped to develop a treatment program for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, the first largescale treatment of that disease in a poor country. Treatment programs for multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are now in place in more than 40 nations, according to Kim’s biography on Dartmouth’s website. He also spearheaded the successful effort to reduce the price of the drugs used to treat this form of tuberculosis.
“Jim is all about delivery and about delivering on promises often made but too seldom kept,” said Paul Farmer, a co-founder of Partners in Health, in an e-mailed statement. “I can think of no one more able to help families, communities and entire nations break out of poverty.”
During his short tenure at Dartmouth, Kim won a reputation as a level-headed technocrat who frequently encouraged students to think globally.
“Most every college president has to get up and say it’s important to go off and change the world,” said Jonathan Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth. “But there aren’t many college presidents who’ve gone out and have changed the world.”
Kim’s ascension to the head of the World Bank is not a sure thing. But the United States supported the candidacy of Christine Lagarde, the former French finance minister, to head the IMF last year.
In recent years, major emerging economies have criticized the decades-old gentlemen’s agreement giving the United States control of the World Bank’s presidency. The Group of 20 countries has called for a fairer, more transparent selection process for the top posts at the World Bank and the IMF, and the World Bank itself has reaffirmed its commitment to an open and merit-based process.
“We are trying to ensure that we start having a process whereby we can choose the most qualified person, regardless of nationality,” said Amar Bhattacharya, the director of the Group of 24, an umbrella group of developing countries. “The struggle is about the credibility of the process as much as it is about who wins.”
Kim is not the only candidate for the World Bank job. On Friday, Angola, South Africa and Nigeria put forward Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Nigerian finance minister and former World Bank official.
As Obama announced Kim’s nomination from the White House Rose Garden on Friday morning, he tried to make the case that an American with a unique background and broad international experience would be a committed representative of the developing world’s interests.
“Jim has truly global experience. He has worked from Asia to Africa to the Americas, from capitals to small villages,” Obama said. “His personal story exemplifies the great diversity of our country.”
His choice was praised by many officials in the U.S. and overseas. Former President Bill Clinton, who advocated for Kim during Obama’s selection process, said in a statement that the nominee was “an inspired and outstanding choice.” Rwandan President Paul Kagame said Kim was “a true friend of Africa” and “a leader who knows what it takes to address poverty.”
Jose Antonio Ocampo, the former finance minister of Colombia and a U.N. official, is rumored to be another candidate.
Jeffrey Sachs, the development economist and director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, had put himself forward for the position and won the support of some developing countries, including Kenya, although the United States was not supporting his candidacy. On Friday, Sachs withdrew his candidacy and endorsed Kim.
“Dr. Jim Kim is a superb nominee for the World Bank presidency,” Sachs said in an e-mailed statement. “I congratulate the administration for nominating a world-class development leader for this position.”
Kim is expected to travel around the world on a listening tour to rally support for his nomination ahead of the World Bank vote, Obama administration officials said.
Obama picked Kim over several more well-known candidates, including Susan Rice, current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations; Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.; and Lawrence Summers, former director of the president’s National Economic Council.
Others mentioned for the World Bank post included Indra Nooyi, the head of PepsiCo Inc., and Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who served in top economic jobs in the Clinton administration.
The World Bank stopped accepting nominations at 6 p.m. Eastern time Friday. The bank has said it intends to select its new president in time for the World Bank and IMF spring meetings in April.
The bank provided $57.4 billion in support to low-income and middle-income countries last year. Under Zoellick’s leadership, the bank raised an additional $90 billion for its fund for the world’s poorest. It also opened up huge troves of data to the public to aid research on development and poverty.
Information for this article was contributed by Annie Lowrey of The New York Times; and by Julie Pace, Martin Crutsinger and Christopher Rugaber of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 03/24/2012