Japan dreamed up the Asian Development Bank, then lost it to Manila by one vote
In December 1965, eighteen future members voted three times on where to put Asia's new development bank. On the final ballot, taken after lunch, Manila beat Tokyo nine to eight with one abstention. The Japanese banker who had nurtured the idea compared it to watching his child carried off to a distant land.
Japan had floated the concept as early as 1956, when its finance minister suggested a regional lender to US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, but Washington showed little interest. A Tokyo study group revived the plan in 1963, drawing on the World Bank experience of the consultant Takeshi Watanabe, and that same year a young Thai economist, Paul Sithi-Amnuai, proposed it at a UN regional trade conference. The two efforts merged, and American backing grew as President Lyndon Johnson planned wider aid to Asia.
Watanabe, after first declining, became the first president when the bank was inaugurated in November 1966, and every president since has been Japanese. That reflects Japan's weight: by the end of 1972 it had supplied 22.6 percent of ordinary capital and 59.6 percent of special funds, against a mere 1.25 million dollars from the United States for those funds. Early lending centred on food production and rural development in what was then among the world's poorest regions.
Priorities shifted with the times. The 1970s brought education, health, roads and electricity, and oil shocks pushed energy projects to the fore. Pressure from the Reagan administration nudged the bank toward private-sector lending in the 1980s, and its first field office opened in Bangladesh in 1982. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis it approved its largest single loan, 4 billion dollars to South Korea, and poverty reduction became its overarching goal in 1999.
In 2009 governors tripled its capital base from 55 billion to 165 billion dollars to confront the global financial crisis. Membership reached 69 in September 2024, with votes weighted by each member's capital subscription.
Source: Asian Development Bank
