Development Experts Urge G-20 to Address Poor-Country Needs
PITTSBURGH,PA(November 23, 2009)-A panel of policymakers and global development experts speaking on the eve of the Pittsburgh G-20 Summit expressed deep concern that despite the rhetoric of the previous two G-20 summits, the needs of poor countries left out of the club are getting short shrift.
Speaking to a crowd of government officials, media, development advocates, and students at the University of Pittsburgh, the panel agreed that recovery from the global economic crisis must include specific measures to help poor countries, including improved market access for their products and money to replace lost tax revenue and to provide direct relief to households, similar to unemployment insurance in the United States and other wealthy countries.
“The G-20 members should ensure that the low-income countries have the resources to participate in the global stimulus and to provide a basic safety net for their people, said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development. “These are countries that cleaned up their act and were growing well. They have been hard-hit by this crisis through no fault of their own.”
Birdsall added that the high-income countries, and large emerging-market countries, such as Brazil, Russia, India, and India, should offer the poorest countries 100 percent duty-free, quota-free market access, with greatly simplified rules.
She estimated that the world’s 60 poorest countries would need about $55 billion over the next two years to replace tax revenue lost through drops in trade, tourism, remittances and other financial flows due to the crisis, as well as to provide for a simple social safety net, to minimize increases in hunger and malnutrition and reduce the number of kids forced to quit school.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund, urged a similar increase in funding for poor countries in a speech at the Center for Global Development last week.
Donald Kaberuka, the president of the African Development Bank, told the audience that the funds provided so far by the rich countries were insufficient and that the bank itself was rapidly depleting its coffers. He said that the bank, acting at the request of the G-20 at previous summits, had “front loaded” disbursements, using money originally been set aside for grants and loans in 2010 and 2011. “This should have been a summit for the poor countries,” Kaberuka said.
“We hope that the summit communiqué will lead with addressing the issues of the poor,” added David Lane, president and CEO of the anti-poverty advocacy group ONE.
Tim Adams, former undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury for international affairs, said that the large countries attending the summit also should pledge to keep their markets open to imports from poor countries—and should match their words with deeds. He worried that despite earlier pledges to avoid protectionism, the G-20 countries have on average taken one protectionist action every three days in recent weeks.
The panel was co-hosted by CGD, a Washington-based think tank, the poverty-reduction advocacy campaign ONE, and the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. Louis Picard, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs served as moderator.
In a major speech last week, Birdsall called upon the United States to exercise leadership at the G-20 Summit to reform the multilateral development institutions, especially the World Bank, to better address the two main challenges of the 21st century: catastrophic climate change and increased risk to poor people and poor countries arising from the globalized economy.
“The G-20 leaders should pledge to begin working together—well before their next summit in Seoul—on reaching a consensus on the functions and institutional architecture needed to implement a global climate accord—including fresh thinking about the potential role of the World Bank,” said Birdsall.
“Because climate change and globalization have greatly heightened risks for the world’s poor, the G-20 leaders should call on the multilateral development banks to become much more active in offering countries innovative risk management tools, such as insurance against natural disasters and bonds indexed to their terms of trade,” she said.