The current director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, has been charged by the World Bank to press its subordinates so that China would leave in a better position in the annual report ‘Doing Business’, which measures the economic dynamism of all
countries of the world.
Georgivea, which before being a director of the Fund was in the World Bank, coordinating, among other activities, the realization of said report, has issued a statement in which it affirms that “I am fundamentally disagreing with the findings and interpretations of the Bank’s document
World.
For sudes, that institution has decided to suspend the preparation of the report.
The United States Treasury Department has declared the newspaper ‘The Wall Street Journal’ that the matter is “serious”.
Due to the size of its economy, the US has the right of veto on the monetary fund.
In the statement, Georgieva explains that she has already had “an initial meeting with the Executive Committee of the Fund on this matter matter.”
The key to controversy is an internal audit conducted by the US law firm Wilmerhalle for the World Bank Department of Ethics.
The document, which is public, argues that, in 2018, Georgieva, which then worked at the bank, exerted “pressures” to “make specific changes in China’s score in an effort to increase its position in the ranking.”
The alleged action occurred when the member countries of the World Bank were negotiating an expansion of capital in which Beijing was expected to “play a key role”.
The then president of the Bank, the American Jim Yong Kim, would also have pressed for China to leave better stop.
As a result, that country ran into 78th, when it should have been at 85, according to the aforementioned analysis.
Since its birth, the report ‘Doing Business’ has become one of the most relevant activities and, at the same time, the most controversial of the World Bank.
On the one hand, it is the methodological question, which led Ajessa as India to question the conclusions of the report that, in its first editions, was based on information provided by third parties in the countries.
Almost all the world ‘rankings’ are made a little bitters, because not everything is comparable.
Thus, for example, according to the competitiveness rankings carried out by the team led by the professor at the University of Columbia, and very direct defender of the Independence of Catalonia, Xavier Room, for the Davos World Economic Forum, the Spanish Judicial System is
Worse than China’s or Saudi Arabia.
Since the Spanish legal system does not contemplate the lashes in public, nor that there is evidence that the State has created concentration camps for ‘re-education’ to about 15% of the Catalan males, the comparison seems to correspond, rather than the scope of the
Right, to the psychiatry.
The second aspect is that of national honor.
At the time when the Bank was led by Paul Wolfowitz, which many considered the main promoter of Iraq’s invasion, which made him a very controversial character, there were information that pointed out that the United States had pressed the bank so that
That country would leave above in the ‘Doing Business Report’.
Sometimes, however, it is more than national honor what is at stake.
In many developing economies and emerging markets, having a good position in the document is an important element in its foreign investment attraction policy.
