World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim | Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Opinion World Bank’s US dependency has to end It’s time to choose the institution’s president based on merit rather than geopolitical considerations.

If you’re looking for a relic of the Cold War, there’s no need to tour a palace in Pyongyang or fly to Havana. Take a look at the presidential suite at the World Bank.

The board of the World Bank is in the midst of appointing the person who will lead the institution for the next five years. The Bank — which has been led by an American for the past 70 years — has promised “transparent consideration of all candidates,” regardless of nationality. Instead, it appears set to re-appoint its current president, Jim Yong Kim, putting an American in charge for a 12th consecutive term.

When the World Bank was created in 1946, it made sense for the United States to dominate its leadership for two big reasons.

First, one of the Bank’s founding missions, as stated by its third president, Gene Black, was to keep poor countries free of “Soviet Communist domination” by helping them develop. The Bank was, in effect, a tool for these kinds of Cold War efforts, which were spearheaded by the United States.

Second, the U.S. put up the vast majority of the initial funds. In 1950, 74 percent of the cash invested in the Bank came from the U.S. So it made sense for the highest-paying country to retain decisive control.

That world is gone. The Cold War ended a generation ago. As more countries joined the Bank, paid-in capital coming from the U.S. has fallen to 18 percent, according to various World Bank annual reports from over the years — less than Europe’s share and equal to the collective paid-in capital of the BRICSS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia).

If objective reasons for U.S. domination of Bank leadership once existed, they have slowly fallen away, much in the same way statues of Marx and Stalin that once loomed over city squares across the world have since crumbled.

The World Bank is wary of losing support in the U.S. Congress if it releases its grip on the presidency, as Todd Moss, my colleague at the Center for Global Development, has cogently argued. But in practice, the U.S. will retain veto power thanks to provisions baked into the board rules — a bulwark against losing control of the institution.

Selecting the World Bank’s president on merit alone would revitalize development policy and strengthen the Bank as an institution. It would tap a pool of highly qualified development experts and managers around the world, people who are full of ideas on how to take the Bank in new and productive directions.

The highly qualified Nigerian candidate Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, for example, has said that she would make youth employment her top priority as World Bank president. Given the links between youth unemployment and violence, this focus would not only respond to the priorities of developing countries, but also be in the interest of the U.S.

Criticism of the Bank’s practice of putting citizenship ahead of merit in the selection of a president has been constant over the years. In 1981, eminent Indian economist S.L.N. Simha wrote, “There is no justification at all for continuing the convention of having a U.S. citizen as the Bank's president. Let this job go to suitable persons in other countries.”

If this problem is left unresolved, it will threaten the relevance and legitimacy of the world’s leading development institution.

In 2008 in the American Economic Review, Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago and erstwhile governor of India’s central bank urged the Bank to make a “free and transparent selection” if it wished to “truly be seen as an honest broker.” Earlier this year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Michael Kremer of Harvard and I wrote, “Maintaining the Bank’s legitimacy will require further steps at the Bank, including breaking with the tradition that only U.S. citizens hold its presidency.” There have been many others.

Outside the halls of research, too, the incongruity of a Cold War institution with the world of 2016 has also become obvious.

The way things are going, we will doubtlessly have the same conversation five years from now, and then five years after that. If this problem is left unresolved, it will threaten the relevance and legitimacy of the world’s leading development institution.

Michael Clemens is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington D.C., U.S. and a Research Fellow of IZA-Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany. He is the author, with Michael Kremer of Harvard University, of “The new role for the World Bank” in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.