Leadership Selection in the Major Multilaterals

Miles Kahler

in Peterson Institute Press: All Books from Peterson Institute for International Economics

Abstract: Leadership selection in the major global economic organizations produced unprecedented levels of public conflict during the 1990s. The convention that awards the IMF managing directorship to a European and the World Bank presidency to an American sparked conflict between the United States and Europe as well as growing discontent on the part of Japan and the developing countries. At the WTO, successive conflicts demonstrate deeper shortcomings in governance as membership expands rapidly and consensus decision making fails. Protracted efforts to choose new heads of these increasingly important organizations have undermined their legitimacy and distracted members from their core agendas. This selection process and its flaws provide a central theme for the analysis and prescriptions presented in this study, which focuses on the major international financial institutions (IFIs) and other global and regional multilaterals. Author Miles Kahler looks at the sources of conflict and presents recommendations for reform: in the short run, changes in the process, such as the use of search committees; in the long run, the dismantling of the US-European convention at the IFIs and changes in representation at the WTO. The author's diagnosis and policy recommendations have important implications for leadership selection in other regional and global organizations.

Date: 2001
ISBN: 978-0-88132-335-1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.piie.com/bookstore/leadership-selection-major-multilaterals (text/html)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iie:ppress:339

Access Statistics for this book

More books in Peterson Institute Press: All Books from Peterson Institute for International Economics 1750 Massachusetts Ave., NW, Washington, DC. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peterson Institute webmaster ().