Police officers patrol near a sculpture in front of the Coex Convention Centre, the venue of the G20 summit, in Seoul November 8, 2010. The G20 Summit will be held in Seoul on November 11-12. The venue is reflected on the sculpture. (Xinhua/Reuters Photo)
BEIJING, Nov. 9 (Xinhua) -- As the Group of 20 (G20) major economies heads for its fifth summit on Thursday, visible gaps remain among its members on subjects as elemental as how to boost the global recovery.
Painstaking efforts are therefore needed before policymakers at the helm of international economic governance can expand their common grounds to strengthen global economic cooperation and invigorate the fledgling recovery as expected.
With the latest global financial crisis on the ebb, G20 has shifted gears from emergency mode to one aimed at shoring up the recovery momentum of the tattered world economy and mapping out a mechanism for long-term global cooperation.
Noting that the world economy still faced grave challenges before fully escaping the financial crisis fallout, Chinese President Hu Jintao stressed in his recent Europe tour that parties at the G20 summit should make concerted efforts, with an "in-the-same-boat" spirit and on the basis of mutual benefit and win-win progress, to enhance macro-policy coordination, rally market confidence and consolidate the recovery momentum.
Hu's remarks resonated among policymakers in Brazil, India, Russia and other main emerging economies. The European Union (EU) has also set it as an overarching goal of the Seoul summit to secure a sustainable recovery and robust and more balanced growth of the world economy.
The United States, for its part, also highlights growth as the keyword, but is more concerned about the growth of its own economy. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said that core challenges to the U.S. economy in the near term were propping up growth and cutting unemployment.
Meanwhile, Washington has repeatedly urged other nations to adjust policies, increase demands and open markets in an attempt to curb external factors that it claims are hindering its economic growth.
Among the alleged factors are trade imbalances and currency issues, which are also at the centre of another major item on the G20 agenda, namely how to stem global economic imbalances.
In order to ease trade imbalances, Hu said, parties needed to adjust their economic development modes and economic structures, promote just and fair trade and oppose all forms of protectionism.
On exchange rates, Hu emphasized that China had been steadily moving forward the reform of its exchange rate regime to allow the market to play a bigger role in determining the value of the Chinese currency, or yuan.
In sharp contrast, the United States, the main contributor to global imbalances, has long been trying to shift its domestic pressure to other economies for its own economic and political good. In line of such a paradigm, Geithner said lately that, during the G20 summit, Washington would especially target those countries whose currencies were "undervalued by any measure," a reference obviously aimed at China.