IMF’s Lagarde warns G-20 to avoid ‘low-growth trap’

Christine Lagarde, the IMF managing director, said that as of 2016, global economic growth had stagnated for five years below the 3.7 percent average that prevailed between 1990 and 2007.

“Not since the early 1990s...has the world economy been so weak for such a long time,” Lagarde said in a statement issued to coincide with the start of the summit.

With member states representing 85 percent of the world’s GDP, the G-20 summit is due to convene in Hangzhou, China beginning Sept. 4 amid a climate of sluggish growth and uncertainty.

Lagarde warned of a “low-growth trap,” high debt, weak demand, eroding work forces and labor skills, weakening incentives for investment and slowing productivity.


World economies face ‘toxic mix’

She said the world’s economies faced a potentially toxic mix of low long-term growth and rising inequality, creating political temptations to populism and raised trade barriers.

But analysts say the G-20 summit is unlikely to achieve a breakthrough, given that it occurs in the absence of a crisis which could prod governments to take action.

With varying difficulties and pressures, Britain exiting the European Union, Japan considering more easing, Germany skeptical of stimulus and China pressed on its industrial overcapacity, member states currently have too few common interests to stick to difficult commitments that are easier to make than to live with, analysts said.

“At the moment there’s simply not a lot of common overlapping interests between the major economies,” Christopher Balding, professor of economics at Peking University HSBC Business School, told AFP.

In a report on global economic conditions for G-20 members, IMF economists said U.S. growth would likely be weaker than previously expected in 2016.

The report’s chief author, IMF economist Helge Berger, told reporters in Washington the organization expected in October to downgrade its U.S. growth forecast in light of the poor performance seen in the first half of this year.

In July, the IMF said it expected the U.S. economy to grow at 2.2 percent this year and 2.5 percent in 2017, already downward revisions from an April forecast.

“It’s clear for the U.S. given the developments in the first two quarters this year that we’re in for a downgrade of that outlook,” said Berger.


‘Lack of determined policy action’

In its report, the IMF said G-20 leaders in 2014 had pledged to raise their collective GDP by 2 percent by 2018. But, as of 2016, member countries had carried out only 55 percent of the commitments they made then, demonstrating a “lack of determined policy action.”
  
Since the Great Recession, the main causes of persistently low inflation have been high unemployment and low commodity prices, with excess industrial capacity driving the price of goods downward, the report said. If unaddressed, prolonged low inflation could reduce investment and drag growth further downward.

While the top ten percent of earners in advanced economies had seen their average household incomes rise about 40 percent to nearly $350,000 between 1989 and 2010, according to a chart in the report, the bottom 40 percent had seen their incomes largely flat over the same period at about $50,000.

“More progress is urgent,” the report said, calling also for new fiscal and monetary policies to support growth, such as public investment in education, more equitable tax-benefit regimes and reducing private-sector debts.