South Korea
This is the first blog post from ONE intern Tom Wallace, who works in our UK office. Please give him a warm welcome!
The G20, a combination of finance ministers from twenty of the world’s most influential economies, meet in Seoul this week to discuss how to promote development in the poorest nations. Building on commitments made at the G20 in Toronto, under the leadership of South Korea, the G20 has been looking at the conditions that generate development success.
The findings of this research will be presented in Seoul. It is expected that the research will highlight the importance of economic growth as a driving factor in generating poverty reduction. Building on this, it is expected that G20 governments will make commitments to focus more of their efforts on helping generate the conditions needed to stimulate economic growth. This will most likely mean a shift in the focus of government support toward improving infrastructure, increasing financial inclusion, securing private investments, assisting good governance and encouraging food security.
While some may consider this a departure from the traditional poverty reduction techniques Jamie Drummond, executive director of ONE, said “This isn’t a false choice between aid on the one hand and growth or governance on the other — we need a joint agenda combining good aid, good growth and good governance because smart assistance will be needed to help build infrastructure for growth and strengthen governance systems, as well as tackle basic needs in health and hunger in the medium term. Sustainable equitable growth can create the long term prosperity to reduce and ultimately eliminate the need for any aid.”
Want to learn more? Download a copy of “The G20 and Africa: Can an Asian tiger help the African lions roar?”, our Seoul summit pitch on inclusive growth in Africa.
Last Friday, I attended a briefing on the upcoming G20 Summit at the Center for Global Development (CGD). It was really neat to hear about it from the experts’ perspective, especially because this year’s Summit will be pretty historic — it’s being held in a non-G8 country for the very first time: Seoul, South Korea.
It will be historic for a number of other reasons, too. This year’s Summit represents a real turning point in global economic leadership. G20 finance ministers are shifting toward a more representative steering body and paying more attention to development, climate change and anti-corruption, issues that were not focused on in previous Summits. The CGD hopes that this year’s Summit will make the switch from a crisis-driven approach to long term-driven — a notion that could potentially “save” the G20.
Nancy Birdsall, president of CGD, said that the Seoul Summit — other than what’s already on the agenda — should focus on a few specific things: creating growth with resilience, making growth that is inclusive and encouraging the public sector to invest in infrastructure. This Summit will not be about new money, the MDGs or charity, she said.
Apart from talking about how to make the Seoul Summit the best that it can be (which you can read about in detail on the CGD website), Vijaya Ramachandran, a senior fellow at the CGD, talked about how to make the G20 more “legit.” As it stands, there isn’t really an official process to get into the Group, and as a result, the G20 isn’t representative of the global economy or people. By creating a standard, clear criteria for “getting a seat at the table,” we can boost the Summit’s transparency and credibility.
We’ll be following the G20 Summit next week and we’ll give you more updates and analysis then. In the mean time, be sure to take a look at those links that I’ve hyperlinked in the text — they’re filled with great information about the Summit.
At the conclusion of the Pittsburgh G20 Summit, Canada’s Prime Minister Harper and South Korea’s President Lee Myung-bak announced that they would both host G20 summits. Here at ONE, we were curious to see how this announcement would play out, since South Korea had already been tapped for the next G-20 and Canada was in line for the next G8.
On Monday, Prime Minister Harper announced that Toronto, Canada, will host the G-20 Summit on June 26 and 27, 2010. He was joined by President Myung-ba, who announced that Seoul, South Korea, will host a second G20 in November 2010.
Since 2005, the G8 has long been a place where world’s wealthiest countries make commitments to partner with developing countries to fight poverty and eradicate preventable disease. In Gleneagles, Scotland, seven of the current G8 countries made a series of commitments designed to bring the world closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. You can read more about that meeting here.
The transition from the G8 to the G20 could be beneficial, especially since the recent global economic downturn taught the international community a painful lesson about the inter-connectedness of financial sectors. However, the world leaders participating in these summits need to provide more clarity about how development issues will be addressed.
During Monday’s announcement, Prime Minister Harper briefly referenced these concerns about developing countries, saying, “We have demonstrated leadership by providing new resources and guarantees to strengthen international financial institutions, namely innovative new capital arrangements to help ensure the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank have resources they can count on throughout the crisis. We intend to continue playing a role in defining the path forward in 2010.”
This acknowledgement is a good step in the right direction. ONE, along with organizations and individuals around the world, will be working proactively to make sure that these twenty nations follow through on plans to strengthen the financial institutions that can help finance poverty-fighting initiatives – institutions like the African Development Bank.
