When finance ministers and central bankers from the world’s 20 largest economies meet in Venice this week, they must seize this crucial opportunity to make headway on the world’s biggest challenges: ending the pandemic worldwide, rallying a global effort to contain climate change and securing a solid economic recovery everywhere on the planet.
On all three counts, time is running out. The failure to commit to a plan to end the pandemic by vaccinating all the world’s adults, such as the one costed at $50bn by the IMF, is unconscionable but also self-defeating. As long as the pandemic is uncontained anywhere, new and potentially vaccine-resistance virus mutations are a risk everywhere.
Strong recoveries are under way in many countries but they, too, are vulnerable to economic troubles elsewhere. Big build-ups in debt, necessary to safeguard jobs and businesses during lockdowns, leave behind fragile financial systems and balance sheets. Rich-country policy normalisation, meanwhile, poses risks to emerging economies (and if premature, to rich countries themselves). As for climate change, policy is still playing catch-up with the scale of the carbon transition most leaders now fortunately admit is required.