Public vs private funding: the jury is still out on the balance

Tokyo

IT SEEMED like a Freudian slip when Asian Development Bank (ADB) president Takehiko Nakao referred during this year's ADB annual meeting in Frankfurt to a "merger" of his bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). He was referring only to combined financing from the ADB and AIIB for infrastructure projects, but the two banks are behaving almost as one in other ways too.

Mr Nakao and AIIB president Jin Liqun behaved during the annual meeting last week rather as though they were heads of a single institution, appearing together on platforms or taking turns to speak in panel discussions during the ADB-organised event. This was hardly suggestive of the "competitive" stance that the two banks had been expected to adopt.