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IMF chief urges G20 to focus on economic balance
World leaders should make rebalancing the world economy the priority for next week's Group of 20 summit in Pittsburgh, says the head of the International Monetary Fund.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Dominique Strauss-Kahn urged the G20 leading industrialised and developing nations to provide the political leadership that had been missing in past efforts to reduce economic imbalances while supporting global growth.
“We need to have rebalancing of growth and in- crease in consumption in the emerging markets to have enough growth in the short term,” he said. “We also need to define what the long-term growth model will be.”
Mr Strauss-Kahn's comments endorse a US-led push to make more balanced global growth – less reliant on debt-fuelled consumption by US consumers – a key theme of the Pittsburgh summit.
The IMF chief said his organisation had been stressing the need to rebalance the global economy for some time. “Multilateral consultations have been held on this topic with conclusions accepted on all sides and nothing happened,” he said.
“We need the G20 to put some steam behind this. The G20 can provide the political leadership while the IMF can provide expertise and capacity. The IMF or World Bank is unable to do this alone.”
G20 officials have discussed a peer-review process by which they would hold each other accountable for implementing policies that move in this direction. The US drive is backed by most European nations, but China appears wary that such a process could be used to put pressure on it to reduce its trade surplus and revalue its currency.
“What they need to do is to try to define together what is the realistic path of adjustment,” said Mr Strauss-Kahn.
He said global imbalances – big differences in national savings, consumption and investment rates reflected in large trade deficits and surpluses – were “bad” and “can be causes of disruptions”. There was “no reason why we would want a situation in the long term in which there are countries with large surpluses and countries with large deficits”.
In the short term, the crisis had resulted in some narrowing of imbalances, with China boosting domestic demand through loans and government spending at a time when there had been a “striking” increase in US household savings.
