- Title: CHINA: G20 vows to combat high oil prices and other economy risks
- Date: 16th October 2005
- Summary: U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE BANK CHAIRMAN, ALAN GREENSPAN, LISTENING
- Embargoed: 31st October 2005 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: China
- City:
- Country: China
- Topics:
- Reuters ID: LVAALPJQE6HF0KEM3J6KNDXV6VHJ
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- Story Text: The G20 group of rich and developing nations vowed on Sunday (October 16) to pursue coherent policies in a world of increasingly global business and trade.
Chinese Finance Minister Jin Renqing said that oil prices and the rich-poor divide featured in discussions.
"We have discussed present dangers facing the world economy, and the measures we must adopt to solve them, especially the problems of rising oil prices and rising disparity in income worldwide," Jin Renqing told journalists at a joint news conference with Australian Treasurer Peter Costello.
The G20 stressed the need to promote energy saving and alternative sources of energy and to reduce subsidies on oil products.
Costello picked up that theme, saying high, volatile oil prices were a major risk to the world economy and announcing a plan for the G20 to tackle the issue of resource security.
Costello also said resource security would be a theme of next year's G20 conference, which Australia will host next November.
"This will become a key question for the international community. The G20 has the opportunity again to discuss the framework which can accommodate the energy and resource security which newly emerging world economic powers will need as they too, change the shape of the world's economy in the future," said Costello.
G20 members also discussed reform of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
"An area where there was a substantial breakthrough at the conference was the laying out of a roadmap for reform of the Bretton-Woods institution, the IMF and the World Bank, recognition that as the world economy has changed, so too these organizations must change and the building of momentum, which we will continue through the next year to see substantive reform to these two important local institutions," said Costello.
G20 participants agreed that the division of national influence over the International Monetary Fund needed changing, but they remain deeply divided on how to do it.
At the conclusion of the two day meeting, G20 finance ministers and central bank chiefs published a joint communique outlining agreements on how to speed up the pace of structural change needed to make global economic growth more lasting and stable. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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