Unwise and ugly acts

Comments on Titli Basu, IDSA: "Asian Development Bank at 50 and Japan’s puzzle", 11/062017

This is a very interesting post that exposes the foolish, futile and self harm acts by some countries in the attempt to maintain their own and long held positions at the costs of other developing countries, as the author put it: “As the US-led international economic order has failed to reflect the shifting alignments, the ADB must grow in order to respond to the varying needs and ambitions of its developing member countries.”

I share the author’s view contained in the following paragraphs:
“The call for re-evaluating ADB’s voting rights is not new. Critics argue that present international institutions should permit space to developing nations and that failure to do so will hurt the relevance of these institutions. The emerging economies have long argued for representative governance, rationalising operations, easing the ADB’s internal processing time and encouraging public-private partnership investments. Japan must take the lead to facilitate governance reforms against the backdrop of AIIB and other new multilateral development banks. Failure to implement internal reforms will impact the ADB’s influence.
“Developing Asian nations will be the beneficiaries of this race for infrastructure financing. Productive competition will diversify emerging economies’ options to choose the most favourable financing terms. Long-term, this will support the larger purpose of empowering emerging Asian economies to augment national growth and enhance Asia’s ability to compete in the global economy.”
PS: I note the author is from the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), New Delhi.