Summit must continue the momentum set in London

Written by By Kofi Annan, Amartya Sen and Michel Camdessus

Almost six months ago, at a moment of great alarm about the global financial and economic crisis, G-20 leaders met for a historic summit in London. Their collective commitments to stimulate, regulate and restructure global economic activity helped to calm nerves.

Many of the problems that spurred the London summit remain real. Anxiety levels may have come down, in the boardrooms and stock markets, but the daily drama for survival continues, and for many has deepened, in the villages and streets of the world’s least-developed countries — particularly in Africa.

The United Nations and the World Bank predict that the direct and indirect effects of the economic meltdown will be felt in the developing world for a long time to come. Jobs have disappeared, incomes have been lost and opportunities forgone. Tens of millions more people have been added to the hundreds of millions already below the poverty line, reversing progress toward attaining the world’s Millennium Development Goals.

The London meeting recognized that the world’s poorest countries and people should not be penalized by a crisis for which they were not responsible. With this in mind, the G-20 leaders set out an ambitious agenda for an inclusive and wide-ranging response. If the Pittsburgh summit is not to be an anticlimactic end to the G-20’s ascendancy as a forum for decisive action, the momentum generated must be maintained. Four issues in particular provide the opportunity to do so.

First, G-20 leaders need to follow through with commitments they’ve made to a Global Plan for Recovery and Reform. Having recognized its “collective responsibility to mitigate the social impact of the crisis and minimize long-lasting damage to global potential,” the group now needs to review how much support has reached or become accessible to developing countries.

There are some encouraging signs. For example, in July, the International Monetary Fund commendably announced a substantial increase in concessional lending to least-developed countries and several of them, including Ethiopia, Malawi and South Africa, have already been allocated “special drawing rights” to help them cope with the economic crisis. However, some of the more vulnerable countries are still struggling to finance countercyclical investment and expanded social protection services. It raises questions about the stringencies of the World Bank’s eligibility criteria and allocation models which can prevent support of the most needy.

This underscores the case for a second area of action — ensuring that developing countries, including least-developed countries, have a greater say in global financial institutions and strengthening regional bodies such as the African Development Bank. An equitable global architecture means not only giving a greater say to the major emerging economies. It also means systematically including other developing countries.

Bretton Woods institutions such as the World Bank and IMF themselves recognize that this would make them more relevant to the reality and diversity of today’s global community and more effective as vehicles for addressing climate change adaptation and poverty reduction. However, the pace of change needs to be speeded up, ensuring that the IMF in particular is able to adapt to postcrisis challenges.

This calls for a broadening of the IMF’s surveillance mandate beyond macroeconomic and monetary policies so that it can deal with wider financial and regulatory issues; it means establishing a very high-level political council to take strategic decisions critical to global stability; and it requires reforming the voting system to ensure decisions command the support of the majority of members.

Architectural and institutional reform has to be complemented by a third achievement: agreement on a timetable for tackling the variety of biased trade rules, bloated subsidy regimes, intellectual property rules and other forms of market distortion that heavily disadvantage the developing world. Here the G-20 could play a particularly constructive role, especially when it comes to the revival of the Doha Trade Round, the reduction of duties, tariffs and quotas on exports from the least-developed countries, and the gradual elimination of domestic subsidies.

Lastly, the G-20 could help drive momentum on climate change. Its members represent the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions; agreement among them at Pittsburgh would go a long way toward ensuring that December’s international climate-change conference in Copenhagen does not end in hot air. Progress is needed on emission-reduction targets and on sharing knowledge and technology more widely. We also have to find a way to provide funding for adaptation and mitigation — to protect people from the impact of climate change and enable economies to grow while holding down pollution levels — while guarding against trade protection in the name of climate change mitigation.

The challenges of our time are many, complex and intertwined. The G-20 in London was responsive to the concerns and special circumstances of the developing world, which resulted in some big thinking. Skeptics fear that now that the collective financial threat is perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be manageable, the Pittsburgh summit will result in a weak compromise that reflects divergent national interests rather than a sense of urgency about tackling climate change, chronic poverty and ineffective global governance. G-20 leaders need again to manage difficult domestic pressures, overcome narrow agendas, resist populist temptations and prove the skeptics wrong.

Kofi Annan is chair of the Africa Progress Panel and a former secretary-general of the United Nations. Amartya Sen is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. Michel Camdessus is a former managing director of the International Monetary Fund.