WASHINGTON: David Malpass, president of the World Bank, unexpectedly said on Wednesday that he would resign in June, leaving open a job that oversees billions of dollars of funding and has a direct impact in developing countries on poverty, climate change preparation, emergency aid and other issues.

The bank has historically been headed by someone from the United States, the bank's largest shareholder, while a European heads the International Monetary Fund, but developing countries and emerging markets are pushing to widen those choices.

According to the bank's 2021 annual report, Malpass earned $525,000 in annual net salary that year, and the bank made more than $340,000 in annual contributions to a pension plan and other benefits.

Here are names being floated by U.S. officials, climate change experts, and global development peers as possible candidates for the job:

SAMANTHA POWER

Power, who currently leads the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), is a longtime human rights advocate, diplomat and former journalist. She served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under President Barack Obama and won a Pulitzer Prize for her 2002 book "A Problem from Hell," a study of the U.S. failure to prevent a number of genocides over the past century.

RAJIV SHAH

Shah is the former USAID administrator under Obama and currently president of the Rockefeller Foundation, a philanthropic group that says it aims to "promote the well-being of humanity throughout the world." The foundation recently partnered with the U.S. State Department on a carbon offset program at COP27, the international climate conference.