A Conversation on the Upcoming G-20 Leaders’ Summit in St. Petersburg

In advance of the G-20 Leaders’ Summit in St. Petersburg, Russia on September 5-6, Brookings experts Kemal Derviş, Eswar Prasad, and David Dollar preview the upcoming meeting and the top issues on the agenda. Topics covered include: the shifting growth momentum across advanced and emerging market economies, tax architecture, monetary and fiscal policy, U.S. infrastructure, China, and economic spillover.

Kemal Derviş: 

“The slowdown [in China] is very relative when you think about it. It’s from a long-term trend growth around nine, nine and a half percent to maybe around seven now. By any standards, seven is not exactly a slow growth, but that difference seems to be important given the new trade links that are quite strong between a lot of the emerging market countries and China.”

Eswar Prasad:

“One of the key issues that I suspect will be debated is about monetary policy stances in many of these economies. Because one thing that is common across the advanced economies and emerging markets is that monetary policy is still being used as a crutch to avoid taking the much more difficult fiscal and structural reforms that many of these countries need.”

David Dollar: 

“The whole world is looking to the United States to manage the exit from stimulus well and then there are important structural reforms that the U.S. could pursue that would provide a sounder foundation for U.S. growth. One issue is that there is a lot of need to repair and rebuild infrastructure in the United States.”