At the two day G-20 summit held virtually on November 21–22, 2020 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies pledged to pay for a fair distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, drugs, and tests across the world to include poorer countries, and to extend debt relief to them. The leaders pledged to spare no efforts to ensure their affordable and equitable access for all people, consistent with members’ commitments to incentivise innovation, recognising the role of extensive immunisation as a global public good.
Even as the global economy is picking up, the road to recovery from the impact of Covid-19, still remains uneven, highly uncertain, and subject to elevated downside risks, more so for the poor countries. There are worries that the pandemic may further deepen the global divide between the rich and the poor.
The European Union (EU) urged G-20 to contribute $ 4.5 billion for vaccines, tests, and therapeutics—Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator—and its Covax facility to distribute vaccines. Germany contributed over $ 592.65 million to this effort. Russia offered to provide Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine, China expressed its willingness to strengthen cooperation with other countries in the research and development, production, and distribution of the vaccine.
The 2020 Riyath Summit was the fifteenth meeting of the G-20. The next summit will be held at Italy in 2021, followed by Indonesia in 2022, India in 2023, and Brazil in 2024. The order of rotating the presidency of the group is worked out amont the member states as per their consultations and mutual convenience.
The leaders declared that they stood united in their conviction that coordinated global action, solidarity, and multilateral cooperation were more necessary than ever to overcome the challenges and realise opportunities of the 21st century for all by empowering people, safeguarding the planet, and shaping new frontiers. They said that they were committed to leading the world in shaping a strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive post-Covid-19 era.
The leaders also extended support to the Anti-money Laundering (AML)/Counter-terrorist Financing (CFT) policy responses and reiterated their support for the FATF, as the global standard-setting body for preventing and combating money laundering, terrorist financing and proliferation financing.
Draft Statement
Some of the highlights of the draft statement are as follows.
- The leaders pledged to continue using all available policy tools as long as lives, jobs, and incomes are safeguarded, and urged the multilateral development banks to intensify their efforts in this direction.
- The private creditors were urged to join the debt servicing moratorium. To deal with poor and highly indebted countries, the leaders pledged to endorse a plan to extend a freeze in debt service payments by the poorest countries to mid-2021 and recommended a common approach to solve the debt problems beyond that. However, the World Bank warned the G20 leaders that failing to provide more permanent debt relief could result in increased poverty and a repeat of the disorderly defaults of the 1980s. The G20 debt relief initiative has helped more than 45 countries defer $ 5.7 billion in debt service payments, but it is far short of the 73 countries that were eligible, and promised savings of around $ 12 billion.
- The leaders took into account the specific challenges faced by African countries and small island developing states, recognising that even some middle-income countries may need debt relief.
- Stating the grave need to prepare for any potential future pandemic, the leaders of the group committed themselves ‘to advancing global pandemic preparedness, prevention, detection, and response’ and ‘to the continued sharing of timely, transparent, and standardised data and information’. The EU also proposed a treaty on pandemics so that the group can respond more quickly and in a more coordinated way in the event of a future outbreak.
- Emphasising on the important role of multilateral trading system, the leaders urged on realising the goal of free, fair inclusive, non-discriminatory, transparent, predictable, and stable trade and investment environment, keeping their markets open.
- They vowed to pursue a way to tax international tech giants, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft to receive fair share of taxes from them as they have benefitted greatly from the shift to tele-working (work from home) due to the pandemic.
- The leaders pledged to safeguard the planet and build more environmentally sustainable and inclusive future after recovering from the pandemic as preventing environmental degradation, conserving, sustainably using and restoring biodiversity, preserving oceans, promoting clean air and clean water, responding to natural disasters and extreme weather events, and tackling climate change are among the most pressing challenges, faced by the humanity presently.
The Group of Twenty (G20), headquartered in Cancun, Mexico, is an international forum for global economic cooperation, consisting of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union. Its members account for 85 per cent of the world economy and 75 per cent of global trade. Leaders from these countries meet annually at the G20 Summit. Apart from that, finance ministers and governors of then central banks meet regularly. They maintain a dialogue with policy makers, representing civil society, business, and labour leaders, the scientific and research community, think-tanks, women, and youth.