203. Letter From the President of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (Black) to Secretary of the Treasury Anderson0
Dear Mr. Secretary: I have been giving further thought to the subject of the appropriate relationship between the International Development Association and the United Nations, concerning which you requested my views. As you know, I am strongly opposed to the creation of any Consultative Board or Advisory Committee of the kind which the U.N. Secretary General has proposed to me. I believe that the basic defect in this proposal is that such a Board or Committee would make it appear that IDA and the Bank itself were subject to political influences, and this would, in my judgment, have a seriously adverse effect upon the marketability of the Bank’s bonds.
On the other hand, I have always considered that it would be necessary and desirable to establish a close and effective working relationship between IDA and the United Nations, such as exists between the Bank and the United Nations, and I would have no objection to an appropriate formalization of such relationships.
As you may know, for some time representatives of the Secretary General, the U.N. Technical Assistance Board, the U.N. Special Fund and the Bank have been meeting, every few months, to exchange information about their respective economic development and technical assistance activities, for the purpose of coordinating their programs in those fields. The meetings have proved extremely valuable, I believe, in helping to avoid duplication and overlapping of effort, and in enabling the agencies concerned to plan more efficiently than would otherwise have been the case.
A similar arrangement would, in my opinion, be equally appropriate in the case of IDA. Since the arrangement involving the Bank was developed subsequent to the conclusion of the agreement between the Bank and the United Nations,1 it is not specifically mentioned in that document and has, in fact, never been formalized. However, in the case of IDA, I think it would be unobjectionable if provision were included in the formal agreement between IDA and the United Nations for the creation of a liaison committee, to be composed of the [Page 392] Secretary General of the United Nations and the President of the Bank and of IDA, or their representatives, which the Executive Chairman of the U.N. Technical Assistance Board and the Managing Director of the U.N. Special Fund, or their representatives, would be invited to join as full participants. The function of this liaison committee would be to enable the Bank and IDA to keep the other participants, and the other participants to keep the Bank and IDA, fully informed on their current programs and future plans in areas of common interest and concern, thereby assuring coordination of their activities in the fields of economic development and technical assistance. Such a provision would establish on a formal basis, and would include IDA within, the informal liaison arrangements presently in effect between the Bank and the other participants in the proposed liaison committee.
I feel confident that the Bank’s Executive Directors would agree to a proposal along these lines, but there has been no occasion as yet to discuss it with them and until I do so, at the appropriate time, the suggestion I have made is necessarily a tentative and personal one.
You have indicated that the United States delegation to the current session of the Economic and Social Council may want to take some initiative in connection with this matter. I feel strongly that this would be inadvisable. In the first place, the staff of the Bank has not yet had an opportunity to discuss the problem in any detail with the U.N. Secretariat, and almost all of the U.N. officials concerned are now in Geneva. I believe that the Secretary General and his staff would take it very much amiss, and that it would cloud our relationship, if any specific proposal were advanced with my implicit endorsement before we had had a chance to clear it with them. In the second place, as I have pointed out, I have not discussed this matter with my own board and would certainly wish to do so before there were any public discussion of a position which I would be understood to have accepted. Finally, and most important, I feel sure that in the event of a United States initiative, the other members of ECOSOC would take it for granted that the proposal had been discussed with the Bank’s management in advance. In a sense, therefore, by making any proposal the United States might be regarded as in effect speaking for IDA, an impression that I know we would both be anxious to avoid.
In my judgment, the proper time for this whole matter to be negotiated and discussed is the fall, after IDA comes into being, when the formal agreement between IDA and the United Nations will be drafted and brought before ECOSOC for approval. I would hope that this would be the position taken by the United States delegation at the current session of ECOSOC.
Sincerely yours,
- Source: National Archives and Records Administration, RG 56, Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury, Robert B. Anderson, Subject Files, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. No classification marking. The source text is stamped “Noted R.B.A.” and bears a July 20 handwritten notation stating it was not answered.↩
- Presumably the IBRD articles of agreement.↩