WASHINGTONG: Local finance leaders on Thursday publicly confronted the rising unpopularity of trade liberalization, saying world economies needed to strive for more inclusive growth.
With Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump leading a surge of anti-free trade sentiment in the United States, and Britain voting to secede from the European Union, top central bankers and finance ministers were pressed to defend long-standing ideology at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings.
“My message to the members of the IMF tomorrow will be, ‘Action, please’,” Lagarde told reporters in Washington at the opening of the annual meetings of International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
But, faced with a surge of anti-free trade sentiment in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, Lagarde warned that now was not the time to close the door on globalisation, which she said had benefitted so many. “We don’t think it’s time to push against it,” she said.
With the US presidential elections a month away, the annual meetings kicked off this week in Washington amid stern warnings against protectionism.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim echoed Lagarde’s call to stimulate growth while tackling persistent inequality. “We need to focus on growth and continue to reduce inequality,” he said in a news conference. “And we have to make growth more equitable, and more sustainable.”
“We shouldn’t apologize for what has happened and hundreds of millions of people being lifted out of poverty and opportunity being created,” Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, told a panel on the global economy.
“But there are challenges with distribution,” he said. “How do we work with people to share those fruits more effectively and how do we make trade tangible?”
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble expressed alarm at the rise of anti-trade populism across the developed world.
“If you look at what we have achieved in reducing the number of very poor people all over the world,” he said.—
