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Analysis

Raising Our Sights:
Standards for Strong Success at the G20 Brisbane Summit

John Kirton, Co-director, G20 Research Group
November 6, 2014

What will define success at the G20's Brisbane Summit? This question came from Mike Callaghan (2014) in an important article appearing on November 3, 2014, twelve days before the summit's start on November 15. Using his intimate knowledge of G20 governance and his independent judgement, he astutely offered a smart, sophisticated set of answers about what the leaders at Brisbane must do to produce a G20 summit success. It is the correct set — if one wants Brisbane to be a summit of solid success. But if one wants, and if the world now needs, these leaders to go beyond this standard, they must raise their sights to make Brisbane a strong success. They can do so by adding additional initiatives and agenda items to the Callaghan List, as described below.

Growth Strategies

• Set an explicit target for the "more than" 2% additional growth the G20 called for in February, with the target at a level appropriate for the slowdown in the global economy and thus baseline the G20 relied on then. Given the disappointments and downgrades since February, 2% more is no longer good enough.
• Add an independent, analytical, accountability mechanism to work alongside and with those mounted by the international organizations controlled by G20 members. The Think 20 and a new Academic 20 that was asked for by G20 leaders at the Seoul Summit could serve in this regard. Such an independent mechanism would add new analytics and credibility to those who wonder if the G20 can escape the dynamics of peer protection that pervade accountability assessments of the standard sort.
• Specify how much of this "more than 2%" will be delivered in the first year of the full five years that G20 governors gave themselves to meet their timetable of 2018. Many members and outsiders need a new burst of growth right now. And evidence shows that at such summits, it is only one-year timetables and not multiyear ones that have an increasing impact on implementation.

Infrastructure

• Identify how the Australian-pioneered approach of state-incentivized asset recycling from
  existing "brownfield" to new "greenfield" infrastructure can be internationally adapted and adopted, in ways that encourage the private sector to invest robustly in the high-payoff new green projects as well as the already-built and risk-free "brown" ones.
• Add the private sector, perhaps through the Business 20 (B20), to the international organizations that will set the benchmarks against which G20 reforms will be judged.
• Identify how the G20 will work with the BRICS New Development Bank and the new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to boost infrastructure investment and its contribution to growth, development and to socially, responsible, ecologically sustainable development too.

Trade

• Endorse bilateral, plurilateral and sectoral approaches to trade liberalization and negotiations, including all those that G20 members have recently secured or that they are now negotiating.
• Agree to immediate liberalization in environmental goods and services among themselves and with countries that wish to join, with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the United Nations Environment Programme being the judge of what is genuinely green trade. The G20 can build on what the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum has recently done. It is time to put the power of trade liberalization behind the compelling imperative of climate change control.

Tax

• Ask the OECD to broaden those who monitor the implementation of the existing G20 tax commitments, by involving relevant professional associations and independent analytical groups.
• Call for the rapid completion of the G20 summit's initial and subsequent commitments on strengthening accounting standards, as these are important in determining who should fairly and legally pay what tax where.

Financial Regulation

• Act to strengthen international accounting standards, as the necessary foundation for making all the other financial regulatory reforms work.
• Commit to act to control the derivatives markets used by non-financial firms.

Employment

• Endorse and authorize an action plan to unleash the power of young entrepreneurs, start-ups, and small and medium enterprises to contribute to the goal of more than 2% growth, to create jobs and reduce income inequality.

IMF Reform

• Identify ways to intervene more effectively to get the newly elected U.S. Congress to implement the U.S. administration-approved voice and vote reforms at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Consider how the B20 and an enhanced Parliamentary 20 could be helpful in this regard.

Development

• Offer practical and political guidance on how to get the existing Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) done on time next year and on how to shape the successor goals.
• Explicitly promise to return development to the G20's Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth and the Mutual Assessment Process.

Energy

• Take more active measures to meet the existing G20 commitment to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, including by working to have this adopted by the full multilateral community as a post-2015 MDG.
• Affirm the principle that energy poverty should not be reduced by relying more on coal that harms the atmosphere, human health and the lives of other living things.

Climate Change

• Repeat and enhance the passages on climate change from the 2013 G20 St. Petersburg Summit declaration, and provide guidance on how to make the United Nations climate change negotiations in Paris in December 2015 a political success by providing an effective solution to the problem.

Ebola

• Endorse and enhance the conclusion in the G20 finance ministers' communiqué on Ebola from their recent meeting in Cairns.
• Commit to mobilizing the monies that the World Health Organization and the UN say are necessary to stop the Ebola epidemic at its source in the three West African countries where it is currently severe, before it infects G20 members and other countries and kills their citizens and their prospects for strong, sustainable and balanced growth.
• Respond to the Ebola epidemic in ways that strengthen healthcare systems more generally, starting with ways that strengthen the ability to help the world reach MDGs 4, 5 and 6 on maternal and child health and on HIV/AIDS, before the 2015 deadline.

Anti-corruption

• Enhance the international regime for internationally extraditing those accused of corruption.

Terrorism

• Expand the G20's standard treatment of terrorism beyond its terrorist finance core to cope with the common challenge arising from the so-called Islamic State in the Middle East.

Geopolitical Risks

• Note that the territorial incursions by G20 members into the territory considered by their neighbours to be their own harms the global economy and the G20 unity necessary to confront compelling problems such as climate change and weapons of mass destruction, including the use of chemical weapons and nuclear proliferation.

References

• Callaghan, Mike (2014), "What Will Define Success at the Brisbane G20 Summit?" Council of Councils, November 3. www.cfr.org/councilofcouncils/global_memos/p33705

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