The Frenchman would like the bank to apply more of the insights of one of his predecessors: controversial Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz left the Bank in 2000 after sharply criticizing the IMF’s handling of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Bourguignon, 58, a former professor at Paris’s elite Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and an authority on income distribution and inequality, agrees with Stiglitz’s views on the shortcomings of market-based solutions. “People say, for example, that free trade is good for everyone; that’s true, but only if within countries there are distributional mechanisms to make sure that trade benefits reach everyone,” says Bourguignon, who most recently ran the Bank’s research department.
Such views, he says, don’t inform “everyday thinking at international financial institutions. What I would like to do is bring an emphasis on distributional impacts to policy debates.” Luckily for him, Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury secretary who clashed with Stiglitz, has decamped to Harvard.
