BEIJING, May 8 -- The Asian Development Bank wrapped up a key annual meeting Monday with Asia's poorest members clashing with their richer neighbors on how -- or even whether -- the bank should be reformed to cater to an increasingly wealthy region.

    Some member countries urged the ADB to keep pace with the region's rapidly expanding economies, while others warned too much change would leave Asia's poorest nations behind.

    Members also differed on whether to focus on regional integration, environmental problems, growing disparities between rich and poor or how to tap Asia's vast pool of foreign reserves and savings. The United States even suggested the ADB might wind down its work as Asian economies get richer.

    "The challenges are considerable but they are challenges partly born in the ADB's own accomplishments," said Kenneth Peel, head of the U.S. delegation at the ADB conference in Kyoto, Japan.

    Chartered four decades ago to end poverty through economic development, the ADB has partly become a victim of its own success. Extreme poverty is now projected to be all but wiped out in Asia within 15 years, and the ADB is suddenly struggling to remain relevant as one of the world's premier development agencies.

    Debate on a possible facelift topped the agenda over the weekend at the ADB annual meeting in Kyoto, where 3,000 delegates from 67 member economies gathered. On Sunday, ADB President Haruhiko Kuroda said economic success, not pervasive poverty, is the newest regional threat.

    Recommendations for reforming the ADB include focusing more on sustainable growth, emphasizing environmentally friendly development and drawing on Asian capital instead of foreign funds.

    While Asian economic growth is lifting the region out of poverty, it is also generating increased inequality that "threatens social cohesion and puts at risk the process of growth itself," Kuroda said.

    Creating jobs for the 1.9 billion Asians still living on less than 2 U.S. dollars a day will be key to stabilizing development, he said. It also requires better education, health care and cleaner governments.

    The region's overstrained infrastructure, meanwhile, is forecast to need more than US$3 trillion in new investment over the next 10 years just to keep up.

    With Asia having transformed itself from a debtor region to a rich club sitting on an estimated US$3.1 trillion in foreign currency reserves, it's time for Asia to mobilize more of its own capital to meet these needs, Kuroda said.

    Rapidly growing economies like South Korea and Thailand that were battered by the 1997 Asian financial crisis, largely supported a stronger ADB. They envision a bank that might help manage part of the region's vast foreign currency reserves and protect against wildly fluctuating exchange rates.

    Some even want the ADB to help set up a regional bond market to finance development spending.

    (Source: Shanghai Daily)