Shaping economic future





Shaping economic future

PM TONY ABBOTT

13 November 2014

Almost a year ago, when Australia assumed the presidency of the G-20, I said that the world needed less talk and more action.

The G-20 Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane on Nov. 15-16 will mark the culmination of a year of action. It is an opportunity to finalize our commitments to strengthen the global economy, create jobs and delivery prosperity to billions of people. With our considerable combined political and economic influence, the G-20 nations are ideally placed to act. Our leaders’ summit is the window of economic opportunity that opens just once a year.

Early in Australia’s host year, G-20 nations set an ambitious goal: To boost our collective economic GDP by at least 2 percent on current trajectories over five years, through a combination of domestic actions, and shared global commitments. Such a boost would add more than $2 trillion to the global economy and create millions of new jobs worldwide.

The mere act of setting this goal — something the G-20 has never done before — served to galvanize members into action.

Over the next several months, G-20 nations came up with almost 1,000 measures to drive economic growth. These included more investment in infrastructure, measures to facilitate trade, changes to competition policy and initiatives to improve work force participation, especially by women and young people.

The collective focus has paid off. In September, after only seven months of effort, the IMF and the OECD estimated the strategies we had developed would take us 90 percent of the way to meeting our growth goal.

Since then, G-20 members have continued to identify new actions and at the Leaders’ Summit it will be confirmed how close we have come to achieving the 2 percent target.

This 2 percent represents a stronger economic future for all of our people and demonstrates the real value that can come from a forum like the G-20. Driving growth in the global economy has been at the centre of the G-20’s efforts this year for the simple reason that growth is key to addressing almost every other global problem — problems that deny people opportunities, stifle private-sector ambition and constrain quality of life.

As leaders we are duty-bound to address such problems. It is our job, individually and collectively. The decisions leaders will be asked to make on Nov. 15 and 16 cover many subjects — jobs, infrastructure, tax, trade, competition, corruption, development and the reform of financial systems. But all are interconnected. And all are on the table because they offer solutions to one big challenge: How do we restore confidence in the global economy now and into the future?

Greater confidence will bring the investment decisions that drive economic growth — which in turn will deliver jobs, opportunity, and higher standards of living for all.

Building confidence requires structural reforms to improve the efficiency of individual economies, and through them, the global economy. Over the course of 2014, through persuasion, G-20 nations have already achieved collectively what might have been impossible acting alone. Cooperation on this scale, to lift global growth through concerted domestic structural reform, is unprecedented.

We have achieved much in other priority areas too. We are on track to deliver the first tranche of tax reforms to help ensure that corporations pay their fair share of tax in the jurisdictions where they make their profits. We’ve agreed to a major, multi-year piece of work to boost private-sector investment in the infrastructure that drives productivity: Roads, ports, railways and power stations. Additional infrastructure worth $70 trillion will be needed globally by 2030. It has been a year of action already but it is not over yet.

In Brisbane, leaders can prove to the world that a forum that showed its mettle in responding to the dark days of global crisis can prove it again; this time in actually shaping the economic future.

We can deliver on reforms to financial regulation that will ensure the circumstances that led to the global financial crisis are never repeated and that we are better equipped to deal with future crises. We can ensure that governments never again bear the cost of bailing out institutions that are deemed “too big to fail” and we have an opportunity to bring greater transparency to the opaque world of shadow banking.

We can set a global target to reduce the individual country gaps between male and female work force participation by 25 percent by 2025.

Most importantly, we can focus on what the global economy will need in the years ahead. I look forward to hosting G-20 leaders in Brisbane. Discussions will inevitably be robust — as they should be — but based on what we have already achieved to date, I am confident we will together deliver strong action on the economic issues that matter most to the world today.

The writer is the Prime Minister of Australia.


 














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