Keeping Poverty Alive Beyond 2020

A Personal View Eminent Persons Group Report

The recent report of the Eminent Persons Group to the ADB President entitled, “Towards a New Asian Development Bank in a New Asia,” is worth reading if only for the rosy future it paints for the peoples of Asia and the Pacific come 2020. As the Bank enters its fifth decade of existence and amid increasingly cutthroat competition from other lending institutions that threatens its “preeminence as a regional bank,” the Report prescribes new directions and approaches for the ADB. These are promoting inclusive growth; facilitating environmentally sustainable growth; and promoting regional (and global) integration.

In so doing the Bank, whose development model has created both so-called millions of beneficiaries and countless unwitting human victims and incalculable environmental harm in a number of Asia-Pacific nations, would preserve its raison d’etre; thus avoid becoming an anachronism in our rapidly-evolving and developing region.

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