ABSTRACT
On 24 November 1986, the Manila-based Asian Development Bank (ADB) became 20 years old. On that date also, Masao Fujioka, a finance ministry bureaucrat from Japan, began his second five-year term as the president of this little known bank, the world’s largest regional financial institution. The bank likes to claim that its performance has both vindicated hopes of a ‘safe’ regional role for Japan and for speeded development throughout Asia. Despite Japan’s enormous financial, investment and trade influence around the world, the ADB remains the sole international organisation in which the Japanese enjoy pre-eminence. The ADB is now on the frontline of commercially strategic trench warfare in Asia. Many critics of the ADB have self-interested motives. The success of the Japanese in manipulating the bank’s procurement procedures evokes self-righteousness that masks considerable envy. Paradoxically, the ADB is right to claim for itself the mande of ‘the most successful regional organisation in Asia’.
