With lone nominee, voting for next ADB president starts

MANILA, Philippines — Election for the next president of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) has started even as the lone nominee supported by the governments of Japan and the Philippines will be running unopposed.

In a statement, the Manila-based multilateral lender said electronic voting among its member-countries’ board of governors – in the case of the Philippines, it was represented by Finance Secretary Carlos G. Dominguez III – began Monday, November 4 and will end November 30.

The new ADB president will be announced on December 2.

Only one person – Masatsugu Asakawa, who is currently a special advisor to Japan’s prime minister and minister of finance – had been nominated to succeed current president Takehiko Nakao.

Nakao will step down in January 2020, but ADB has yet to determine when the next president will start his term.

Asakawa was nominated by ADB governors in October, but he still needed to get the vote of “a majority of the total number of governors, which must represent a majority of the total voting power of ADB’s member-countries,” ADB said.

At present, ADB has 68 members.

Dominguez earlier on expressed support for Asakawa.

Last month, the Department of Finance (DOF) quoted Asakawa as saying that he will push greater assistance for education and health projects to foster social inclusion in the Asia-Pacific region.

Dominguez met Asakawa on the sidelines of the recent World Bank-International Monetary Fund (IMF) 2019 annual meetings in Washington, D.C. in October.

“Securing high-quality jobs of people could be a better instrument than the transfer of money. So the so-called ‘social inclusion,’ which means providing more education, securing more healthcare to let them have better jobs is really important. So far, the ADB has done something but I would like to expand the conversation as well,” Asakawa told Dominguez.

Asakawa said social inclusion was “an indispensable element in sustaining a country’s high economic growth and reducing poverty and income inequality.”

In response, Dominguez told Asakawa that “the ADB’s priorities in this aspect are in sync with the socioeconomic reform agenda of President Duterte, whose administration has provided free tertiary education in the Philippines’ state universities and colleges and will start implementing next year a universal health care program that will primarily benefit low-income Filipinos.”

In turn, Asakawa said the universal health care program was a “really good” initiative of the Philippine government.

Also, Dominguez reiterated his call for ADB and the Washington-based World Bank Group to harmonize their efforts and explore their many complementarities in order to achieve more effective and efficient delivery of services to their borrower-members.

“We want to continue that effort to make sure that cooperation and coordination between the two institutions are not duplicated,” Dominguez said.