February 15, 2008

Assign to the diasporas a chair at the World Bank

Sir Michael Fullilove in “The world must adapt to diasporas” February 15, holds out that the “world would profit from developing an understanding…of diasporas issues” and I could not agree more.

As a former Executive Director at the World Bank (2002-2004) I believe that instead of wasting our time reshuffling the votes among geographically bound my-own-backyard interests, we need to assign one of the chairs at the board of the World Bank to the working emigrants community (and another one to the multinationals).

In 2007 the emigrant workers of El Salvador remitted to their homeland 3.7 billion dollars which, if this amount represents fifteen percent of their earnings means that their gross income was around 24.7 billion dollar. The official GDP of El Salvador, if we reduce it by the amount of the remittances, is then only 14.8 billion dollars. Now, you tell me ¿where is really El Salvador? Should not the Salvadorian diasporas have 50% of the seats on the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador?

Doing the same operation as above for the whole world we calculated that the Gross Diaspora Product is greater than that of the GDP of India, perhaps even China’s, and so why should not the diasporas sit at the executive board of a World Bank in globalized times?