25 January 2007
South Africa's role as one of the world's important emerging market economies was highlighted at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, addressing the meeting in her capacity as G8 president and head of the EU presidency, announced efforts for "new forms of dialogue" between the G8 leading industrial nations and emerging economies.
Among the envisaged partners in this new dialogue, Merkel specifically named Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.
She told global political, business and academic leaders in Davos that the G8 summit in June would seek to launch this new dialogue, which would then be continued in other international institutions.
Among the targets Merkel set for Germany's G8 presidency was finding ways to integrate Africa more fully into world trade.
She also called for a resumption of the Doha global trade liberalisation talks, suspended some six months ago, adding that a united front by the G8 was essential to bringing the dynamic emerging economies of the world to participate in global responsibility.
Globalisation was a force for good, Merkel said, but all countries had to be treated fairly and integrated into the global economy.
Shifting global power equation
The focus on emerging economies is in line with the conference theme, "the shifting power equation".
Introducing the theme on Wednesday, WEF executive chairman Klaus Schwab called on the 2 400 participants in the meeting to help shape a global agenda that addresses a world that is rapidly changing and where power is shifting geopolitically.
Also on Wednesday, the WEF and the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee issued the final report of a two-year review of the international monetary system in cooperation with Group of 20 governments.
The report concludes that a critical mass of governments appears poised to adapt international financial institutions to a world characterised by increasingly large cross-border private capital flows, wider geographic distribution of economic activity, and deepened regional macroeconomic and international trade policy coordination.
"A new geography of international finance is beginning to emerge," Marc Uzan, executive director of the Reinventing Bretton Woods Committee, said in a statement.
"The big questions that policy-makers are grappling with today - from the persistence of large global imbalances, to the huge accumulation of reserves in surplus countries, to the day-to-day functioning of the IMF - can no longer be viewed through the traditional prism of the G7 [or G8 minus Russia] vis-à-vis the rest of the world."
According to WEF MD Richard Samans, the G7 has, "in ways implicit and explicit ... begun to accept that its influence will have to be shared, as evidenced by the medium-term strategic review initiated by the IMF's managing director, which has set in motion negotiations likely to yield significant additional shifts in the institution's distribution of quotas and votes within the next two years."
SouthAfrica.info reporter
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