World Bank Group President, Robert B. Zoellick Addresses the Annual Meetings Plenary Session
CHAIRMAN: Thank you, Mr. Strauss-Kahn.
I now call on the President of the World Bank Group, Mr. Zoellick, to address the Governors.
Mr. Zoellick?
MR. ZOELLICK: I'd like to welcome all of you to our Annual Meetings and to thank our Chair, thank my friend and colleague Dominique Strauss-Kahn for very close cooperation over the course of the past year, and I would like to thank all of you for joining us this morning.
In the spirit of the governance changes that we have been making, and especially with the important steps that you took at our Spring Meetings for the World Bank, Dominique and I thought that it would be useful to try to streamline these meetings, so I very much appreciate your support as we seek to do so.
And in the same spirit, I thought it might be useful for me to open with more of a corporate-style report. So, after describing the context as we see it and reporting on results and reforms, I'll close by trying to identify some of the challenges ahead and some questions, and I hope these can guide our discussions over the course of the next two days.
So, to start, the good news is that global growth has returned but not strong enough to cut into unemployment in many countries.
Now, as the next slide shows very importantly, output has not recovered to pre-crisis levels in high-income countries and particularly in the developing area of Europe and Central Asia. If you look at that top orange line, that is China, and you can see that it has continued quite strong. The dark line below it is the general group of developing countries that have returned back to the starting point, but you can also see that high-income countries in Europe and Central Asia are still behind the recovery process.
read full report @
http://www.worldbank.org/wb/am_plenary_RBZ_final.pdf
