The Great Debate UK

from The Great Debate:

Challenges for the G20: The IMF and regulation

-- Stephany Griffith-Jones is executive director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. The views expressed are her own. --

There are many important challenges facing G20 leaders when they meet in London in early April.

The first is to coordinate sufficiently large fiscal and other measures to ensure that world aggregate demand recovers, and a major recession is avoided.

It is also crucial that concrete measures are taken that will allow developing countries, especially those that may become foreign-exchange constrained, to sustain growth. This will not only be key for avoiding a large slowdown in growth and increase in poverty in those countries, but also to guarantee important demand for developed country exports. It is estimated that around 200 million people could be pushed into poverty, mainly in developing countries, if rapid action is not taken to soften the impact of the crisis on those countries.