Taking on a new job is always daunting, but even more so when the challenges confronting the global economy continue to mount. Just months into my term as the new president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), it is clear to me that the bank has an increasingly important role to play in trying to create the conditions for renewed and sustained growth in the countries where we operate. Our focus is on two regions that face strong economic headwinds, albeit for very different reasons. In a world of scarce money, the demand for our help is huge and balancing their needs is crucial.
For more than two decades, the EBRD has been operating in the former communist bloc. The bank was set up to ease and guide the economic transition from state control to the free market. We are a long way on from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but such change is a long and drawn-out process, remedying decades of under-investment and distorting state intervention in large parts of the economy. It would have been difficult enough even without the economic jolt of 2008 – a crisis which has revealed weaknesses in many of the 29 countries with which we are involved across a giant swathe of territory stretching from Romania and Montenegro in southern Europe through central and eastern Europe, Ukraine, Russia and central Asia, all the way to Mongolia on the Chinese border.
