The main event for today will be a G20 summit held in Shanghai, where leaders will gather to discuss means to support the sluggish global economy. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said it is imperative to speed up existing structural reforms and use fiscal and monetary measures more effectively in order to attain that.
“Global growth prospects remain clouded in the near term, with emerging-market economies losing steam, world trade slowing down and the recovery in advanced economies being dragged down by persistently weak investment,”
said the OECD, as it urged the leaders to deal with these conditions.
The OECD’s mission is to monitor reforms within G20 countries in order to achieve an earlier set of goals of increasing global economic growth by 2% until 2018. In order to do that, more than 800 reforms were introduced since 2014, however, their implementation still remains delayed.
Concerns regarding developments in China are also expected to take a priority in G20 discussions. The world’s second-largest economy has reported a growth of 6.9% for 2015, which was the country’s weakest in last 25 years.
On the other hand, Germany has shown a strong opposition to proposed loosening of the current fiscal stimulus program. Wolfgang Schaeuble, at a meeting with his counterparts before the summit, warned that space for further monetary easing is exhausted and using additional debt to boost a growth will lead to “zombifying” of economies.