Could Sakong Take the IMF Job?
Ask any prominent policymaker, think-tanker or professional economist in Washington who they think of first when they want to know what’s going on in the South Korean economy and most will respond with one name: Sakong Il. So it’s no surprise that his name is being tossed around as one of the potential successors to International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who resigned yesterday after being charged with sexual assault in New York earlier this week.
Mr. Sakong is currently the chairman of the Korea International Trade Association but he spent last year in the limelight as the head of the presidential committee that put together the G-20 Summit in November, one of the biggest diplomatic events South Korea has ever hosted. (And definitely one of the most hyped.) In the months leading up to that event, Mr. Sakong lobbied for the establishment of a secretariat for the G-20, giving the ad hoc group an office and bureaucracy that would raise its influence on existing global financial institutions like the IMF. So far, the G-20 nations have resisted. Mr. Sakong was South Korea’s finance minister in 1987-88, its first under a democratically-elected president.
He went to the U.S. in the early 1990s and wrote a study called “Korea in the World Economy” that helped cement his reputation in Washington as one of the public faces of South Korean economy. Our Beijing-based colleague Bob Davis reached Mr. Sakong in London yesterday to talk about the selection process for the next IMF chief. Mr. Sakong told Mr. Davis that the selection should be “merit based” and not dependent on the home country of the candidate. Several prominent Asian finance leaders have made the same point this week. By tradition, the top IMF job is reserved for a European and French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde is considered the top European candidate.