Arab Spring Crisis / About lack of jobs says World Bank Chief

In an interview with RT the World Bank Group President, Jim Yong Kim touched on some key global problems: ending poverty and increasing the private economic sector, fighting global warming and ending the political crisis in Mali.

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RT:So you are continuing the WB’s mission to fight world poverty, it’s actually a policy that has recently become a priority for the Bank, but startlingly, 80% of people in the world actually live on less than 10 dollars a day. Do you ever stop and say: “Wow, we have a mountain to climb”

JYK: Well, you know, I feel that I have the best job in the world. The fact that we walk in every day and on the wall of the WB states “Our dream is the world free of poverty”. You know, there is 80% of the world living on less than 10 dollars a day but there are also 1.2 billion people living on less than 1.25 a day. So the fact that fighting absolute, extreme poverty, conditions no one should live under is I think one of the greatest privileges of working for a group like the WB.

RT:When you think of world poverty, it’s still such an abstract thing. I know you had a remarkable career as a doctor, working in the field every day in places like South America and Russia’s Siberia. Do you feel that you were more useful back then helping people directly, than fighting something that is so intangible?

JYK: You know, it’s become more and more tangible over time. So for example we know, that investing in health, investing in education, social protection programs are critical to lay the foundations for economic growth, that will lift people out of poverty. And the other thing we know is that every country in the world should know to grow its private sector and this is a real issue here in Russia. President Putin has said he wants to improve his business climate and wants to move quickly up the rankings to be among the top-20 countries in the world in terms of ease of doing business. Every single country in the world has to figure out how to grow their private sector so the businesses can grow and create the kind of jobs that people want. If you look around the world and see what kind of crises erupted, especially for example in the Arab Spring, those crises were specifically about the lack of jobs, the lack of access to the economy, the inability to feed their children. So we now know a lot about what it takes to lift people out of poverty – provide them health, education, social protection and then figure out ways of having the right fiscal policies, right monetary policies, grow your private sector. So our messages while they have to be tailored to each individual situation are very encouraging in a sense because we think there is a path for all countries to grow their economies, to provide basicf health education so people can live productive and dignified lives.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from

via ‘Arab Spring crisis is about lack of jobs’ – World Bank Chief — RT Business.