Increasing Economic Growth in Fragile States Can Help Prevent Future Refugee Crises—World Bank President
BERLIN, April 5, 2016—World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim today said that the world’s powers need to pay far greater attention to boosting developing economies and creating jobs in the most fragile countries in order to give more opportunity to people in those nations and to prevent future refugee crises.

Speaking at the German Institute for Economic Research, Kim noted that boosting inclusive economic growth and reducing extreme poverty was critical to helping avoid an even greater refugee crisis in the coming years. Citing World Bank projections that extreme poverty globally would only fall to 6 percent by 2030 if economic growth mirrors the average growth rate of the last decade, Kim said that would mean that in the most fragile states, the poverty rate would remain extraordinarily high, at 47 percent of the population.

“All of Europe and all of Germany are rightly focused on the refugee crisis on the continent today, but if fragile states still have 47 percent of their people living on less than 2 euros a day by 2030, while the developed world prospers, the flow of migrants and refugees will not stop,” said Kim.

Kim stated that how the World Bank Group engages in the fight against poverty will need to change, and that global issues such as forced displacement carry important implications for how the World Bank will operate going forward.

“For instance, our Board – in a groundbreaking decision just last month – offered Jordan, a middle-income country, rates that we had reserved for the poorest countries, because of their enormous generosity in hosting more than 1 million Syrian refugees,” Kim stated. “We have provided an initial $100 million loan at concessional rates normally reserved for only the poorest countries and will provide an additional $200-400 million dollars in concessional financing to build a special economic enterprise zone, which will help create many thousands of jobs for both Syrian refugees and Jordanians over the next five years. This is a truly novel effort that must now be taken to scale and implemented in other countries as well.”…