Global development initiatives. From the National Press club, this is an hour. Good afternoon. And welcome. My name is mark hamrick. I am a former president of the National Press club. I am currently president of the society of American Business editors and writing and Washington Bureau chief with bank rate. Com. The National Press club is the worlds leading professional organization for journalists, committed to our professions future, through our programming with events such as this while working to foster a free press around the world. For more information about the club, please visit the website at press. Org. To donate to programs offered for the public through the Journalism Institute visit press. Org institute. On behalf of our members worldwide i would like to welcome our speaker to those in the audience. The head table includes guests of the speaker as well as working journalist, club members. If you hear applause in the audience, wed note that members of the general public attend, so its not necessarily evidence of a lack of journalistic objectivity. We would also like to welcome our cspan and other audiences here today. You can follow the action live on twitter using npclive. After our guest speech concludes well have a question and answer period and ill ask as many questions as time permits. Now its time to introduce the head table guests. I would ask you to each stand briefly as your name is announced and hold off on applause until afterward. Well begin on this end of the table welcoming paula hong, an intern at wiener public news and a student at georgetown university, bravely studying journalism and government. Good to have you here today. We want to note that she is working with the Headliners Team member who organized todays luncheon. Robert wiener, president of wiener public news and a member of your Headliners Team. Thank you for your work. Jillian rich is a reporter at investors business daily. Sheila redzepi, Vice President for external and corporate relations with the World Bank Group. Nancy chen, anchor at our local abc affiliate. Chief executive officer at the world bank. Good to have you. Skipping over the podium to my right, betsy fisher martin, executive in residence at American University and cochair of the npc Headliners Team. Skipping over our guest speaker, donna borak, senior Economics Writer at cnn money. Kevin wintsing, a captain with the u. S. Navy, retired. Executive director of first global challenge. Thank you for your service, kevin. Bob, i didnt realize you were back at the head table. Got you earlier. Weve got kevin. Frank islam, chairman and ceo of fi investment group. And now a round of applause for our head table. Thank you. [ applause ] now to our guest speaker today. The world bank was created at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944 along with the International Monetary fund, with which its often confused. The world bank might be described as the Biggest Community bank on the planet. The main mission of the bank involves projects targeting the community at local levels. Projects like alleviating poverty and helping women climb the economic ladder and those focusing on improving the health of People Living in the developing world. This is the work of the world bank under the leadership of dr. Jim yong kim, its 12th president. Our guest speaker holds a ph. D. In anthropology and is a physician. He was born in seoul, South Carolina south korea but grew up in iowa. He was gb quarterback of his hi School Football team. His father taught dentistry and his mother got a ph. D. In philosophy. He is going to discuss the key projects and goals for 2018 and beyond. He began his first term in 2012 and was reappointed in september 2016 to a second fiveyear term. The world bank is comprised of five institutions providing both funding and Technical Assistance to countries and private organizations with the goal of reducing poverty and boosting prosperity around the world. In other words, it is an ambitious effort. Unlike his predecessors, dr. Kim did not come from the political or financial arenas, rather, his background is in public health, medicine and leadership. He was one of the founders of community health. He went on to lead the World Health Organizations hiv aids program. Immediately prior to being nominated and elected World Bank President he served four years as president of dartmouth college. He was part of a movement that he described that sought to close the world bank. He said he is glad that movement failed. Under his current leadership, the world bank is calling for the end of extreme poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity, focusing on the bottom 40 of the population in developing countries. But how to meet those goals. At a recent press conference dr. Kim gave a hint when he referenced some positive trends but also had some words of caution. He said after several years of disappointing growth, the Global Economy has begun to accelerate, trade is picking up but investment remains weak. He noted his concern about risks including the rise in protectionism, policy uncertainty or possible Financial Market turbulence which could derail the Global Economic recovery. As you can tell, we have plenty to discuss and think about today. Please give a warm National Press club welcome to dr. Jim yong kim. [ applause ] thank you so much, mark, for the introduction. I will start with some comments but then i would look forward to the discussion. So glad to be here at the National Press club. And all of us know that in the midst of frantic news cycles and competition for our attention, i just want to step back a bit and reflect on what we have been doing at the World Bank Group to try to build what i have been calling the new foundations of human solidarity. This is at a time when these very foundations of human solidarity are under question, and sometimes even under attack. Peace and stability are critical to our efforts to grow economies and help people lift themselves out of poverty. We recently launched a report that surveyed 750 multinational investors and corporate executives. We asked them what is most important to you when you think about investing in a developing country. The top three issues were political stability, security, and the right regulatory environment. Of course, the policy environment. All of which are key areas of focus for our work. Now, ill start with the good news about the Global Economy. Growth is robust worldwide. We predict 2. 7 this year. In the Second Quarter of last year, so the highest quarterly growth rates since 2010. Trade is picking up. Around the world millions of people each year continue to lift themselves out of poverty. But this is also a time when multiple crises are either in full bloom or looming on the horizon. Conflict, pandemics, Climate Change and famine are impacting people all over the world and contributing to an historic number of people who have had to who have been forced to migrate. Countries in nearly every region are turning inward. International and homegrown terrorism now affects every corner of the world. It often feels like increasingly the interconnected Global Community is pulling apart, pulling away from each other. The World Bank Group was founded exactly to tackle these kinds of challenges. And if you read back at some of the Historical Documents from the Bretton Woods conference its striking how much the language of that time could apply to today. We have a specific mission and goals, which i will talk about in a bit. As an institution we are part of the post1945 world order that was predicated on the notion that what affects one city, one country, one region, can have immediate and lasting impacts on all of us. Thats a notion that has driven our work, and it drives, in fact, the entire Multi Lateral system. The global order thats helped ensure decades of relatively peace and prosperity was, in many ways, an american vision. Long before it was clear that the allies would win world war ii, president Franklin Roosevelt began lookinghe ahead to the wod beyond the war. He knew that the existing institutions wouldnt be enough to shape the postwar order. The United States had to lead an effort to build an entirely new system that wouldnt just prevent world wars but would ensure a lasting peace. Roosevelt knew that stable Global Financial systems were critical. So he tasked his treasury secretary at the time, henry morganthau, to design it. The treasury departments plan for a fund to oversee Global Financial stability and a bank to support reconstruction and development was the foundation for what became the imf and the World Bank Group. In the summer of 1944, in the mt. Washington resort, in Bretton Woods, a group of people met, and at that time the allied forces were fighting in normandy. And so the remarkable thing about the Bretton Woods conference is it happened while the war was still going on. China had sent a representative, of course, the uk, under the leadership of John Maynard Keynes and the 44 nations spoke about the most critical issues. Secretary morgenthau said the goal was to create a Dynamic World economy in which the people of every nation will be able to realize their potentialities in peace. Raise their own standards of living and enjoy increasingly the fruits of material progress, for freedom of opportunity is the foundation for all other freedoms. For the past 70 years, that world order, the United Nations, nato, the world trade organization, the imf, the World Bank Group, oecd, has helped to ensure relative peace and stability. And from the very beginning, the mission of the World Bank Group has been to help ensure that everyone has opportunity, what morgenthau called freedom of opportunity. The world banks First Mission was to Fund Reconstruction in europe. In fact, the first loan the world bank ever made was to france. But after the marshal plan, after the announcement of the marshal plan at at commencement address at harvard in 1946 by general marshal, the focus shifted to development and poverty reduction. It evolved into the World Bank Group that exists today. As mark said, five institutions that provide our countries with specialized financial tools and global knowledge. And thats key. We are the only global Multi LateralDevelopment Institution and the Value Proposition is that we bring knowledge from every corner of the earth to every one of our clients. The very First Institution formed in Bretton Woods is the International Bank for reconstruction and development, ibrd. It uses its aaa rating to issue bonds, and the financial people here, we have one of the best aaas in the world. We borrow at minus 15 basis points, not quite as good as u. S. Treasury but close. We borrow money in the Capital Markets and provide loans to middleIncome Countries. Its critical to invest in middle Income Countries. They represent about one third of global gdp. In i more than twothirds of People Living in poverty live in middleIncome Countries. Another arm of the bank is the International Development association, ida, as we call it. It was founded at the request of president eisenhower. Requested in 1960 by the president to provide concessional, in other words, close to zero interest loans with a maturity of about 40 years. And grants to the worlds poorest countries. Now we have about 75 countries that qualify for these lowinterest loans. We also have a private sector arm founded 60 years ago. The International Finance corporation, or ifc, invests in the private sector in developing countries. Ifc makes Equity Investments in companies, uses tools such as first loss guarantees, to rerisk sectors and create markets to bring in other private sector investment. The first loan provided was to the German Company seamans that wanted to invest in brazil when brazil was truly a frontier market. The Multi LateralInvestment Guarantee Agency helps to derisk projects, sectors and countries by providing Political Risk insurance and credit enhancement. It actually invented Political Risk insurance. If a Company Wants to invest in a country, wants to purchase a company, for example, and theyre worried about bad things happening like, for example, a change of regime and the regime nationalizes, that that company you can buy insurance to protect you against that possibility. We invented it. Now there are many, Many Companies that do it. Its sometimes the Critical Link to making a company invest or not invest. Finally, we have our International Center for the settlement of investment disputes, which facilitates arbitration between international investors. Over the past two decades it has helped settle many disputes around the world including several related to nafta. Every day when World Bank Group staff walk into our building, they pass a large sign that reads, our dream is a world free of poverty. That was put up there by my friend and predecessor. In different ways each arm of the World Bank Group contributes to that dream of lifting people out of poverty. You know, one of the great untold stories, as we have made tremendous progress in the past three decades in reducing poverty. The percentage of people in the world living in extreme poverty, which by our definition is living on less than 1. 90 a day, has gone from 35 , 30 years ago, to less than 10 today. Nearly 1. 1 billion people have lifted themselves out of poverty since 1990. The majority of those, of course, were in china, that was responsible for lifting 700 Million People out of extreme poverty. But there is still a tremendous amount of work to do. Some 770 Million People still live in extreme poverty today. So to make the dream of a world free of poverty a reality, were using powerful financial tools. I like to say that we are using the tools of the rich. The rich people use these tools every day to make themselves wealthier. We are trying to use the tools now on behalf of the poor. We have always innovated. The swap where parties Exchange Cash flows to achieve positions that are more in line with their risk profile. We invented the swap. We use now swaps to mitigate currency risk and Interest Rate risk. Were developing new derivative instruments to manage all kinds of risk. Commodity risk. Disaster risk and weather risk. Were developing new tools all the time. I will tell you about a few in just a bit. And so, as we use these tools of the rich, such as leverage, swaps, derivatives and insurance, we are trying to create new ones every day that specifically are focused on serving the poor. After i became president of the World Bank Group i asked a Pretty Simple question. We say that our dream is a world free of poverty but why dont we put a deadline on that dream. So we adopted two goals in the spring of 2013 about nine months into my first term. And that is to end extreme poverty by 2030 and to boost shared prosperity. In other words, to boost the incomes of the bottom 40 of developing countries faster than the growth of the economy. And this was our first effort to directly address the question of inequality. A year ago we i outlined the three ways that were working to get there. The first is to acceler