
The G20 not only should but can be meaningfully useful to recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic
The global financial crisis of 2008–10 brought the Group of Twenty (G20) into being. Nearly 12 years later, what we have misleadingly called the postcrisis period has proven to be a mere pause between savage global shocks—this one the result of a global pandemic—demonstrating that international cooperation is a recurrent need. The G20 must rise urgently to the challenge as it did in the last global crisis, but even more forcefully with more lasting commitment.
A newly released PIIE Briefing sets out ten policy areas where practical near-zero cost collective actions can meaningfully speed the return of global health, physical as well as economic. Fruitful areas of cooperation range from disease control, to international trade, to financial policy. Importantly, many of our recommendations are simply for mutually binding and beneficial changes in government behavior, whether forswearing self-defeating aggression in trade or agreeing to lean together against dollar shortages and excessive capital flows; no additional expenditure is needed, just getting past mutual distrust. Most of our other recommended policies require only small investments, like in health innovation, or self-liquidating ones, like in central bank liquidity provision. This is the proverbial low-hanging fruit. Leaders just need the vision and will to act collectively to grab it. Collective action, and the small allocation of additional resources, primarily to the world’s poor, will be rapidly repaid.
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Πηγή: piie.com