Aldo Caliari, guest blogger, part of our 2011 Spotlight G20 Series
When the first G20 Summit was launched in 2008 in order to provide an emergency response to the global financial crisis, the premise was that dramatic reforms were needed in a short period of time. Those reforms could never happen in the slow-moving machineries of the institutions with full representation of all countries, such as the UN, hence, the need for the G20.
Three years down the road, and based on the preliminary agreements that one can foresee happening in the coming Summit in Cannes, the G20 has negligible progress to show, calling such premises into question. The world veers dangerously close to a new global recession that, if it happens, will catch developing countries in a worse position than three years ago. The President of the World Bank informed last month that developing countries’ fiscal positions are, in the average, two percentage points of GDP down from where they were pre-crisis. In the face of what is arguably a more pressing emergency than three years ago, the Group cannot even agree to throw its full weight behind the coordinated stimulus measures of the kind and scale to which they’d previously agreed. The idea that grand agreements can be reached by the most powerful countries, if only small countries stop acting as spoilers or brakes in the multilateral machinery with their delaying tactics or parochial views, has evidently no merit to it.