Fifty years after it began operations, the Asian Development Bank spent its golden anniversary looking to the past as it attempts to shape its future in a turbulent and unpredictable era.
In the decades since the bank’s 1966 launch, some $270 billion in loans and grants have been disbursed in a region that has experienced immense change over the past half century. But it is the present and future that loomed large during last week. With a rapidly changing global climate, a growing wealth gap, and mass youth underemployment in the region, development in Asia is becoming an ever more complex idea.
The bank offered a raft of new agreements on climate financing, technology, and gender and health. But ADB President Takehiko Nakao also reaffirmed the bank's central belief that infrastructure is the key to development.
Bank officials repeatedly highlighted the $1.7 trillion that the region is anticipated to need in infrastructure each year. That figure was also used to dispel talk that China's Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank could elbow out the ADB.
But cooperation, not competition, was what bank officials sought to stress.