CRI听力:IMF, World Bank Willing to Cooperate with AIIB

Speaking ahead of the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington DC, IMF chief Christine Lagarde is lauding the AIIB as a good step toward helping a region which has significant needs.

"The proposal to have a completely dedicated institution [AIIB] that will focus on infrastructure on a regional basis is actually an attractive proposition and it is not that the region is short of needs, it is short of potential projects, That [AIIB] is a most welcomed institution and one with which the IMF certainly is planning to cooperate with."

World Bank President Jim Yong Kim is echoing Lagarde's suggestion.

"As I've said many times, we welcome the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. As I've just mentioned, infrastructure needs in the developing world are enormous and they are enormous in Asia, which for AIIB, is defined as sort of reaching from China all the way to the Middle East. And so our full expectation is that we will continue to work with them very closely."

At the same time, Jim Yong Kim says the World Bank would also like to team-up with the AIIB on certain projects.

"I suspect that in the early period we'll play a much larger role in project preparation because we have much more technical expertise than the AIIB has right now. But there's no reason why we would not do a lot of the project preparation, for example, through our Global Infrastructure Facility and then AIIB could be a co-investor. "

There are 57 founding members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

The goal of the China-initiated lending facility is to finance major infrastructure projects in Asia.

For CRI, I'm Luo Bin.