G20 summit's gift will be long-term view
A backload of issues will be addressed at next month's G20 Leaders' Summit in Hangzhou, East China's Zhejiang province. At a time when the world economy is struggling to recover from global financial crisis, still showing a low growth trajectory and high unemployment, the G20 is striving to turn itself from immediate crisis management to a mechanism for establishing long term governance strategies for better macroeconomic coordination and cooperation to prevent future crises.
A more structured policy coordination framework has been in the works since 2014, when the Brisbane G20 summit set a target of an additional 2 percent growth by 2018 using "1,000-plus actions". Every G20 member state prepared growth strategies with a large number of macroeconomic and structural reform commitments. The "Brisbane agenda" was further developed last year when Turkey held the G20 chair - for instance, country-specific investment strategies were adopted to address shortfalls in growth commitments.
After assuming the G20 chair this year, China laid special emphasis on reforms to boost medium- to long-term growth potential of the world economy. In this connection nine priority areas of structural reform have been identified, and the guiding principles and a set of index system for measuring the progress and results of the reforms are underway.