(Bloomberg) -- President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the World Bank will on Wednesday visit China, the top US geopolitical rival, as the next stop on a global tour to meet with member nations and build support for his candidacy.
Ajay Banga, a former Mastercard Inc. chief whom Biden nominated last month, will meet with China’s finance minister, leaders of the People’s Bank of China and the president of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the US Treasury Department said in a release Tuesday.
The discussions will focus on how the World Bank can best meet its core development goals while addressing global challenges like climate change, pandemics and fragility, the Treasury said.
China has been a major focus for outgoing World Bank President David Malpass. Known as a China hawk during his previous years as a top Treasury official in the Trump administration, Malpass repeatedly pressured China to provide more debt relief for developing nations since the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic.
China insists that the World Bank and other multilateral development banks be included in debt restructuring of distressed nations — a stance partly driven by a Chinese view of those institutions as proxies for US power. That’s drawn pushback from Malpass and the US, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen earlier this year accusing China of obstructing a deal for Zambia.
Read more: Biden World Bank Pick Banga Urges Private Lenders to Step Up
Banga last month deflected a question about whether he shared Yellen’s view on China’s role, speaking at a sit-down with reporters. He said he believed that with World Bank member countries that he planned to visit, “having their points of view known, understood and openly discussed — maybe not agreed to, but openly discussed — is an important part of leading a multilateral institution.”
China is the biggest bilateral lender to developing countries. The nation’s lending by its two largest development banks through its Belt and Road Initiative from 2008 to 2021 equaled about 83% of the sovereign lending for the Washington-based World Bank, but critics say the money often comes with onerous conditions.
Banga started his world tour earlier this month with visits to Kenya and Ivory Coast, which then came out with endorsements of his candidacy. He’s also been to the UK, Belgium and Panama. While nominations are open through the end of this month, no other candidate has yet emerged, and Washington’s choice has traditionally taken the top spot at the World Bank, where the US is the largest shareholder.
If elected, Banga would be at the forefront of efforts to push the World Bank to evolve from its traditional focus on country-specific anti-poverty lending, to global objectives like fighting climate change and to more aggressively extend its balance sheet.
--With assistance from Viktoria Dendrinou.
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.
Advertisement