International Cooperation

The G7 Summit

  • Nice pictures, not enough action. Despite a 25-page communique, the G7 Summit in Cornwall at the weekend came up with only small commitments on the most urgent issues facing the world. Gordon Brown’s damning judgement (“an unforgivable moral failure”) echoed the verdict of almost all development and environment NGOs.

  • Climate finance. With the G7 Summit taking place just five months before the UN climate conference COP26 in Glasgow in November, a key demand of climate-vulnerable nations was for the G7 to finally achieve the $100bn per annum in financial support for low-income countries originally promised in 2009 and reiterated in the Paris Climate Agreement. The most recent OECD estimate is that in 2018 financial flows were around $80bn. But while reiterating their ambition to reach the $100bn figure over the next four years, the G7 announced no new climate finance commitments.
  • ~~International reaction. Climate journalist Ed King collated a number of disappointed responses to the climate finance pledges from key figures in the Global South.
  • ~~A “Green Marshall Plan”? Prior to the Summit, Boris Johnson had proposed a climate "Marshall Plan” to help the Global South decarbonise, named after the postwar US lending scheme for European reconstruction. By the second day of the Summit this had mysteriously become President Biden’s “Build Back Better World (B3W) Partnership”, framed as a strategic Western initiative to counter China’s huge Belt and Road investment programme in the Global South. The White House press release was reproduced in the Summit communique.  
  • ~~The overall climate package. With G7 Environment Ministers having last month agreed to phase out international investment support for coal-fired power stations, the Summit saw additional funding announced to help developing countries move away from coal. The BBC’s Roger Harrabin analysed the overall package.

  • Economic recovery and debt relief. The G7 committed to “build back better” from the Covid pandemic, promising recovery plans “that create jobs, invest in infrastructure, drive innovation, support people, and level up so that no place or person, irrespective of age, ethnicity or gender is left behind.” But on debt relief for low-income countries and the reallocation of an expected $650bn issuance of ‘Special Drawing Rights’ (new money) by the IMF, the Summit made no new commitments, merely reiterating existing policy. These issues will be revisited at the Annual Meetings of the IMF and World Bank in October.
  • ~~The current debt package. The Jubilee Debt Campaign (JDC) summarised the key problems with the current debt package: too many nations are excluded from the Common Framework for solving unsustainable debt burdens and the Framework fails to include private creditors.
  • ~~The importance of debt relief. The JDC calculates that African countries spend three times more on debt repayments to banks and speculators than it would cost to vaccinate the entire continent against Covid-19, with private creditors alone receiving $23.4bn in debt repayments this year.

  • A new economic era? The Summit communique noted that a recovery focused on the above objectives “has not been the case with past global crises, and we are determined that this time it will be different”. This followed Boris Johnson’s pre-Summit urging that world leaders should not “repeat the mistake” of the 2008 financial crisis, when austerity response measures had exacerbated inequality. The G7 committed to maintain current fiscal support for their economies, with the long-term sustainability of public finances to be considered only “once the recovery is firmly established.” This was a clear repudiation of the previous policy orthodoxy adopted by all the G7 countries after 2008.  
  • ~~International tax cooperation. The Summit also emphasised the importance of the path-breaking agreement on corporate tax cooperation achieved at the G7 Finance Ministers meetings a week before. For more on this, see last week’s Digest.
Weekly Updates

Local economies

Finance

  • Digital currencies. The Bank of England set out its thinking on digital money, including the advantages and disadvantages of establishing its own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).
  • ~~The case for CBDC. Josh Ryan-Collins of the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Policy explained the case for a central bank digital currency which, by reducing the role of private banks, could help ensure money flowed more directly to productive uses, including household incomes. He sets out the rationale behind regulating “systemic stablecoins" such as Facebook’s Diem.
  • ~~Cryptocurrencies. Positive Money’s Simon Youel took up the issue of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, pointing to the risks that crypto-assets put upon financial stability and calling for robust regulation.

  • Tackling financial sector greenwashing. The Treasury has announced a Green Technical Advisory Group to oversee the delivery of the UK’s ‘Green Taxonomy’ - a “common framework setting the bar for investments that can be defined as environmentally sustainable”.

Climate change and industrial strategy

  • Regional just transition. The New Economics Foundation released Powering the Just Transition, proposing a decarbonisation pathway for industry in Yorkshire and the Humber. Given that the green transition could destroy 250,000 high-emission jobs in the region, the report recommends co-designing decarbonisation plans and local industrial strategy with workers and communities to mitigate impacts. (Twitter thread summary / Yorkshire post coverage)

Work

Welfare

Trade