Ebola and poverty

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim is a doctor by training. When he was young, he battled highly contagious diseases among the poorest of the poor in Haiti, Peru and Lesotho.

And so he knows what he is talking about when he warns of the threat of an Ebola pandemic in Africa: "It has been painful to see us replay old failures from previous epidemics," Kim said in a speech at Howard University in Washington ahead of the annual meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The World Bank had already given $105 million to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, more than any other organization, Kim said. All in all, the lender had provided over $400 million in aid commitments, rising to half a billion if the IMF's contributions are added.

But it faces the problem of whether and how these funds can be put to meaningful use in Africa, when there the epidemic threatens to destroy government structures.

A fight against inequality

"The battle against the virus is a fight on many fronts - human lives and health foremost among them," Kim said. "But it is also a fight against inequality. The knowledge and infrastructure to treat the sick and contain the virus exists in high- and middle-income countries. However, over many years, we have failed to make these things accessible to low-income people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone."

Sierra Leone is where the Ebola epidemic is spiraling out of control. The official statistics from the health authorities say over 120 people died from the virus last weekend alone. Nearly 100 new cases have been reported. The total number of reported deaths there is climbing rapidly toward 1000, while aid workers assume a significantly higher number of cases is going unreported.

The spread of the highly contagious virus seems unstoppable: In Texas, the first patient in the US is fighting for his life, and in Spain the first European fell ill earlier this week.

A 'lottery of birth'

In the long term, however, Kim wants a much more fundamental approach to tackling the problem of rampant epidemics in developing countries by fighting poverty and inequality with greater determination.

"Thousands of people in these countries are dying because, in the lottery of birth, they were born in the wrong place," Kim said. "If the pandemic continues to jump to other countries, the growth lost could climb into the tens of billions of dollars or higher."

The World Bank therefore has set itself a new goal: "Boosting Shared Prosperity." Its underlying belief is that enormous growth potential is wasted, if the bottom 40 percent of a population is unable to share in the income gains of an economy. The lower income groups must be able to develop enough purchasing power if an economy is to achieve lasting and sustainable growth.

Paradigm shift

At its core, this is something of a paradigm shift for the two UN-affiliated organizations. Previously, they condemned redistribution policy and government intervention as harmful for growth, and required credit recipients to undertake market liberalization and deregulation in the belief that free markets could solve any problem.

But a purely supply-oriented growth policy has allowed the gap between rich and poor to grow. Today the world's 85 richest people own as much as the poorer half of the world's population, aid organization Oxfam has calculated. It's no wonder IMF head Christine Lagarde recently talked about the need for a better balance between supply- and demand-oriented economic policy.