World Bank says China can teach African countries how to develop

BEIJING, Dec. 7 Kyodo

China's experience in poverty reduction means it has a lot of lessons it can teach other developing countries, particularly in Africa, according to a visiting World Bank official Thursday.

Strong leadership, fiscal prudence and learning from others are the reasons why China has experienced such fast growth over recent years, said James Adams, the bank's new vice president for East Asia and the Pacific.

''China's poverty reduction has been a very big part of global poverty reduction in the last decades and I think it would be very good if that experience could be more widely shared,'' he said.

Adams said he has suggested ways on how the bank can work with China on a number of pilot projects in Africa and other countries.

China is also keen to bid for more World Bank-funded projects in Africa, which are currently worth about $4-5 billion a year, he said. Chinese firms at the moment win about 25 percent of all major bank-funded construction contracts on the continent.

The vice president was speaking following a week-long visit to China on which he toured some of the poverty reduction projects being jointly promoted by the World Bank and the Chinese government. The bank currently lends China between $1-1.5 billion a year.

He visited Guizhou Province in southern China, where he inspected projects that are helping to develop new tourist sites and providing training for village enterprises that want to export their products.

Adams also heard about a number of health insurance schemes in the province and bank-funded projects to build new roads to help the region's economic development.

COPYRIGHT 2006 Kyodo News International, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning