John Kirton: A Summit of Substantial Success

The fifth G20 summit, taking place in Seoul, Korea, on November 11-12, 2010, stood out as a significant event in several ways. It was the first time a G20 summit had been held in Asia, after the first four in the largely Anglo-American, Atlantic world. It was the first time the summit had been hosted by a new rapidly emerging country, rather than by an established G8 power of the past. It was the first time the summit was delivered in tandem with the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ meeting, taking place immediately afterward on November 13-14 in neighbouring Yokohama, Japan. It was also the first time the summit was held in a region where the Cold War had not ended, and where a hot war could break out at any time. The host was a democratic, developed polity devoted to open trade and now a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The Seoul Summit came with a major G20 business summit and a pre-summit scholarly conference, and just after the first meeting of G20 parliamentarians, all helping bring civil society into G8 governance in a collective way.

The Seoul Summit took place at a critical time. Needing careful management were the fragile, uneven global recovery, the possibility of another European financial crisis similar to that in May 2010, the potential threat of a looming “currency war” and debates about containing current account imbalances. Leaders had to convince the new American Congress elected on November 2, with its Republican majority in the House of Representatives, that good growth and jobs would soon return. The advanced economy leaders needed to show suspicious markets eying deeply indebted European countries led by Greece, Portugal and Ireland, and publics protesting painful austerity measures in France and Britain, that they remained committed to the medium-term fiscal deficit and debt reduction targets they had promised as the central achievement at their Toronto Summit on June 26-27, 2010. This task was rendered acute by the risk premium on Irish government bonds spiking to historic highs, due to fears of a default, just two days before the summit’s start. And with new major quantitative easing in the United States and Japan, an undervalued Chinese renminbi and recent taxes on capital inflows into Brazil and other consequential countries, G20 leaders needed to move back from the brink of what could have become a genuine crisis in the macroeconomic field.

Competing Assessments

As it approached and unfolded, the Seoul Summit was subject to a vibrant debate among competing schools about its accomplishments and the causes that lay behind.

The first school of post-crisis declinists argued that the G20 had been reduced to merely a deliberative forum, rather than decisional and delivery one, due to the absence of a crisis, the “impotence of the multilateral system” and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the lack of political competence and commitments from a key leader and the absence of constricted, controlled participation in the group. In the judgement of Larry Elliot (2010), “sadly, after a good start, the G20 is proving is disappointingly ineffective. Far too many countries and international organizations have found a way of gate crashing the meetings, turning them into a G20. That has meant plenty of talk but little action. What’s more, the departure from the international scene of Gordon Brown means there is nobody driving the process forward.”

A second school said nothing substantial was in store at Seoul. Paul Krugman did not “expect to see any serious measures to address the crisis” coming from the summit (Agence France Presse 2010b).

A third school saw no macroeconomic agreement coming, making Seoul at best only a domestic political management success. Irwin Stelzer (2010) forecast: “don’t expect the G20 summit meeting in Seoul … to produce a unified response to slow growth, excessive debts, the threat of future inflation, trade and currency wars, or anything else except the photo op.”

The Argument

In the end Seoul produced a summit of substantial success, led by its achievements on the four big issues as the basis of its built-in agenda. It did enough to develop its Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth to contain current account imbalances and any prospective currency wars, meet their established deadlines on domestic and international financial reform and push for the conclusion of the Doha Development round of trade liberalization in 2011. It made few advances — but at least did not make things worse — on development, climate change and energy, food and agriculture, and anticorruption. Together with the moves to institutionally strengthen G20 governance, these policy accomplishments were enough to keep the momentum of G20 cooperation and institutionalization alive.

In its macroeconomic message the Seoul Summit’s success was bifurcated. It reinforced and repeated in appropriately adjusted form the “Toronto terms” of stimulus now, exit soon and fiscal consolidation in the medium term. It did so in ways of particular use to a economically and fiscally struggling United States still with no credible plan for medium-term budgetary reductions. But it did nothing to promise European governments, now under escalating attack from the bond market, that G20 governments — including those with fiscal surpluses and massive foreign exchange reserves — would ride to their rescue should the need arise. This suggested that the G20 had successfully made the transition from a global crisis response committee to a global steering committee, but had not simultaneously remained an alert, anticipatory, first responder to the next crisis at hand. These accomplishments were driven in the first instance by a second, erupting eurocrisis and by the familiar spectre of a 1930s-like currency war that could fuel the trade protection that G20 leaders had already credibly committed to avoid. The built-in advances on the framework and domestic regulatory and international financial institutional (IFI) reform were prompted by the general failure and specialized assistance of the old IMF and the help of the newer, G20-guided Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and Financial Stability Board (FSB). Less progress came in areas where the more political United Nations, its functional agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its fragile bodies guiding climate change had the lead. The strongly predominant, equalizing capability among the advanced and emerging members of the G20 drove progress on macroeconomic policy, the framework and IFI reform. The compact G7 club within pushed advances on domestic financial regulation, with an exception for the domestically big Asian banks as global systemically important financial institutions (GSIFIs). The G20 leaders were further united by their commitment to the G20’s core mission of preserving financial stability, the continuity and experience of virtually all of them in G20 summitry, and the economic and business expertise of host Lee Myung-bak, former host Stephen Harper and key emerging country leaders led by India’s Manmohan Singh. Finally, the intensity of their face-to-face interaction, with five G20 summits in less than two years and the reinforcement from advanced-emerging plurilateral summit institutions such as APEC drove them forward in areas where a looming crisis was not at hand. However, with less than 24 hours for their summit, they had too little time together to cope with the new eurocrisis erupting in small Ireland on the summit’s eve and spreading to infect Europe’s larger countries such as Spain and Italy as they met.

The Physical Summit

Benefits

The direct economic benefits for Korea of hosting the summit, said to attract 10,000 visitors, were estimated to be very large (Ramstad 2010). Indeed, the government-affiliated Korea International Trade Association calculated there would be a $28 billion benefit to the Korean economy, as the summit improved the country’s image and increased demand for Korean products abroad. It calculate the summit would create 166,000 jobs, or more than half the 300,000 jobs that Korea creates each year

Costs

A front-page story by Mark McDonald in the International Herald Tribune described preparations for the Seoul Summit as “extravagant” and concluded “Korea is not throwing its G20 party on the cheap … The organizers have declined to estimate the total cost, but the mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, said in an interview Tuesday the city was spending just $9 million extra.”

Security

An estimated record 50,000 police officers — a full one third of the national force available — and the “tens of thousands of troops” deployed to protect summit-related venues, along with naval vessels and the coast guard (Reuters 2010). To protect the visiting leaders themselves, Korea created a special unit, erected a security fence over two metres high around the two-kilometre perimeter of the summit site and passed a special law “giving police greater power to break up street rallies and allowing a military presence in public places” (Agence France Presse 2010b, 2010c).

Protests

On Sunday, November 7, as many as 40,000 protestors marched outside City Hall. A full 9,000 police officers, including riot police, surrounded them. When a group of protestors tried to march down a nearby street, they were stopped by riot police firing pepper spray — a weapon not routinely relied upon at summits in Canada since the APEC leaders meeting in Vancouver in 1997 (Lee 2010). Equipped also with water cannons and police buses, the police detained at least 10 protesters (Reuters 2010). This was but the start of daily protests that would culminate in a mass rally, at a site that was not made known in advice, on the summit’s first day.

At the Summit

At Seoul, the finance deputies met on Monday, November 8, and the sherpas met on Tuesday, November 9, with both meeting together on Wednesday, November 10, until half past midnight into the day the summit began. They were unable to agree on the key, divisive issues of currencies, foreign exchange and current account imbalances. At the sherpa meeting, the political differences were greater than they were among the finance deputies. Sherpas were unable to decide even when they would meet again on Thursday. They agreed only to report to their leaders, who were then arriving in Seoul, while lower-level officials kept working in unofficial bilateral and multilateral meetings during the day.

Throughout Thursday the leaders held many bilaterals. Host President Lee Myung-bak met with U.S. president Barack Obama to try to conclude their bilateral free trade agreement negotiations initiated three years before. Their failure to do so reduced the summit’s momentum for liberalizing global trade. Lee also met with UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon on November 10.

The summit itself had seven sessions. It began with a reception at the National Museum of Korea on Thursday, November 11, at 6.00 p.m., followed by a working dinner until 9 p.m. that flowed into the first discussion session on the global economy and the framework. After dinner the sherpas and finance deputies were due to meet again to fine-tune the communiqué. Working until 3 a.m. the next morning a smaller group of six sherpas from Korea, China, the U.S., the UK, Germany and France completed the draft communiqué for their leaders to approve and release later that afternoon.

The summit resumed the next morning, with the first plenary session from 9.00 a.m. to 10.00 a.m. continuing the discussions on the global economy and framework. After a half-hour break for the family photo at 11:00 a.m., from 12:40 p.m. to 2:10 p.m. the working lunch dealt first with trade and then with climate change and green growth. This was followed by a plenary session on financial regulatory reform and a session on energy, anti-corruption and the Seoul Business Summit. The summit ended at 4:00 p.m., after which the leaders’ news conferences were held.

Achievements

Macroeconomic Policy and the Framework

The macroeconomic message from Seoul reinforced and repeated, in adjusted form, the Toronto terms of stimulus now, exit soon and fiscal consolidation in the medium term. It did so in ways of use to a fiscally struggling United States with no credible plan for medium-term budgetary reductions.

Yet as it opened, the Seoul Summit also needed to contain the second eurocrisis of 2010. This one had erupted on Wednesday in Ireland, spread on Thursday to Portugal, Spain and Italy, and seemed ready to move elsewhere when European markets opened on Friday, just after the Seoul Summit came to an end. Toronto’s balanced macroeconomic message, highlighting the need for stimulus now, exit soon and fiscal consolidation in the medium term, no longer seemed sufficient to stave off this second sovereign debt crisis. Rather than placing credible emphasis on fiscal consolidation in the mid term, the G20 leaders needed to send a solid signal right now that global governors, led by the G20 themselves, would immediately provide public money if needed to rescue European governments, even though Germany at the core of Europe said it would not.

The Seoul Summit met this test only to a minimum degree. It did much less to reassure beleaguered European governments that G20 governments, suggesting that while the G20 had successfully made the transition from a global crisis response committee to a global steering committee, it had not remained a first responder to the next crisis at hand.

The Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth

G20 macroeconomic management was bolstered by taking the Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth and the MAP to the next level of detail and determination, with all G20 members committing to making the broad array of adjustments necessary for all to be better off.

Domestic Financial Regulation and Supervision

With macroeconomic crisis and confrontation contained, the Seoul Summit could focus on delivering its two biggest items on its built-in agenda, on domestic and international finance. Leaders politically endorsed the new rules on the quantity and quality of banking capital, liquidity and leverage that the BCBS had crafted in mid September on the G20’s behalf and that their finance ministers and central bank governors had approved at Gyeongju. They guided work on systemically significant financial institutions and on cross-border resolution regimes and derivatives. They addressed credit rating agencies, accounting standards and other related issues as well. They responded to the predictable proposals for new bank levies and international financial transaction taxes in ways that deflected populist pressures but did not damage the economic recovery and the confident, capital-rich financial system on which it depends.

IFI Reform

The second, more politically pressing challenge was to complete the promised shift of at least 5 percent of the quota share at the IMF to the rapidly rising emerging economies from Asia from the declining, established continental European ones. This needed to be done in a way that the legislatures of all IMF members, including the coalition governments in democratic polities that would lose influence, could ratify back home. Here the Europeans had initially shown few signs to make the necessary accommodations, even as the Americans had used their dominant position in the IMF to induce them to move. Making such a constitutional change in a zero sum game is usually what leaders alone are asked to do. Yet the finance ministers at Gyeongju importantly prepared the way by crafting a creative, balanced bargain that respected the basic needs of those that count. The leaders approved it at Seoul, thus avoiding the danger of breaking their bargain with a hitherto patient China, India and Brazil.

Trade and Investment

On trade the leaders made modest moves, due to the activism of Pascal Lamy, head of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the free trade convictions of G20 host Lee Myung-bak, Canada’s Stephen Harper, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Britain’s David Cameron and others. They promised to complete the Doha Development negotiations by a new, now one-year deadline of the end of 2011. They also pledged full support for global free trade, mandated a universal standstill on all protectionist measures by all countries and promised to combat protectionism that harmed sustainable development.

Climate Change and Energy

Similarly, mobilizing climate finance proved to be very difficult, as leaders largely accepted China’s insistence that the subject be left to the UN and its climate change conference in Cancun from November 29 to December 10, just after the Seoul Summit ended. However, Lee’s impressive credentials as an environmentally committed leader at home and abroad saw Seoul make modest but badly needed progress in more rapidly eliminating fossil fuel subsidies and in fostering green growth as a whole.

Food and Agriculture

Little beyond stock taking and a set-up for the French-hosted G20 summit in 2011 is likely on the other important issues, notably food security and price volatility,

Corruption

The G20 promised steps to fight corruption by identifying people and businesses conducting illegal activities and removing them from the market.

Financial Safety Nets

Some success has already come on Korea’s two additions to the G20’s inherited agenda. On financial safety nets, the IMF responded to meet the need in an appropriately multilateral rather than regional way.

Development

Under the label of the “Seoul Development Consensus for Shared Growth,” the G20 endorsed a strategy based on “resilient growth.” The summit defined new principles and an action plan, drawing on Korea’s own experience in generating growth through instruments beyond public aid. As foreshadowed by the draft communiqué dated November 3, the consensus called for a partnership between rich and poor countries in nine pillars, including mobilizing domestic finance, financial inclusion, social protection, good governance, infrastructure, private investment and food security. The G20 proposed a new focus on development by the World Bank and a new high-level panel to recommend ways to speed things up.

Health

The Seoul Summit Document mentioned health directly only once, referring to “reforms to strengthen social safety nets such as public health care and pension plans, corporate governance and financial market development to help reduce precautionary savings in emerging surplus countries.” It failed to recognize that soaring healthcare costs, driven largely by chronic and non-communicable diseases, were the leading health challenges of most of the advanced and emerging G20 members. If left unaddressed those health issues would make it difficult for the advanced economies to meet their Toronto commitment to cut their fiscal deficits in half by 2013.

Dimensions of Performance

Domestic Political Management

On the first dimension of domestic political management, Seoul performed well. All the leaders except King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia chose to come to the Seoul Summit, including Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, whose trip was imperilled by a volcano potentially grounding aircraft at home. Australia’s Julia Gillard, who had been absent from the previous G20 summit in Toronto, came to a Seoul that was closer to home. Brazil’s Lula da Silva, who had similarly been absent from Toronto, was accompanied by his protégé and successor, Dilma Rousseff, to sit at the summit table by his side.

The G20 leaders were also generous in issuing communiqué compliments to themselves. Such compliments went to Felipe Calderón of Mexico and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia on climate change, to Canada, Korea and the United States on financing for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Mexico for hosting the next negotiations of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), to Japan for hosting the 10th Conference of the Parties on biodiversity and to Korea for hosting a successful Seoul Summit. There was thus an even balance between G7 and non-G7 members in the G20.

The G20 did less well in securing editorial approval for the G20 institution and the Seoul Summit in the elite international newspapers, above all for its host. Immediately before the summit, the G20 received virtually no editorial attention from such major publications as Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune. Many media reports also referred to the legacy of the Toronto Summit in June, largely in favourable or neutral terms. Typical was Sewell Chan of the New York Times, who reported on Wednesday, November 10 — the day before the Seoul Summit started — that the Toronto Summit was the place where a previously reluctant U.S. president Barack Obama finally decided to become serious about trade liberalization, by agreeing to implement America’s full free trade agreement with Korea, agreed to under George Bush three years earlier (Chan 2010).

Less frequent was the more critical view expressed in a front-page story by Mark McDonald in the International Herald Tribune. While describing preparations for the Seoul Summit as “extravagant,” he concluded that “Korea is not throwing its G20 party on the cheap (although it seems unlikely that Seoul’s budget will surpass the $860 million that Toronto spent to hold the previous summit meeting, last June). The organizers have declined to estimate the total cost, but the mayor of Seoul, Oh Se-hoon, said in an interview Tuesday the city was spending just $9 million extra … The Toronto Summit was beset with violence and nearly a thousand arrests. Mr. Lee and his lieutenants will be tolerating none of that.”

Deliberation

The Seoul Summit issued two documents — the Leaders’ Declaration and the Seoul Summit Document — totalling 22 pages and containing 9,535 words. It also produced three annexes (on the Seoul Development Consensus, the Multi-year Action Plan on Development and the G20 Anti-Corruption Action Plan) that added 12 pages more plus a 49-page table listing “Policy Commitments by G20 Members.”

Direction Setting

The communiqué was infused with affirmations of G20 responsibility to provide global public goods, starting with financial stability. With its emphasis on development, it strongly supported egalitarian principles too. Those of ecologically sustainable development had a secure place.

The G20 further affirmed democratic values 14 times. In the lead was transparency, with 10 affirmations, accountability with three and candour with one.

Decision Making

The Seoul Summit made 147 specific decisional commitments. This was the highest of any G20 summit thus far, surpassing the previous peak of 128 at the 2009 Pittsburgh Summit.

Delivery

The actual delivery of these commitments will only be known when the G20 leaders assemble for their next summit in one year’s time. However, in the communiqué they repeatedly expressed their determination to implement their pledges. They confidently declared: “What we promise, we will deliver.” They also put in place several mechanisms for monitoring compliance and implementation, using both G20 institutions and several external multilateral organizations.

Development of Global Governance

Seoul strengthened the G20 summit system in several important if incremental ways. It proved that a successful summit could be chaired and hosted by the first non-G8, non-Anglophone, non–Atlantic country to take on the task. By confirming the selection of host for 2012 it provided the two-and-a-half-year shadow of the future that would give the global community confidence that the G20 would stay in business and allow members to plan their summit strategies several years in advance. By selecting Mexico for 2012, following Canada and Korea in 2010 and France in 2011, it affirmed that the G20 was genuinely a club of equals, moving between advanced and emerging economy members, and the major geographic regions of Asia, Europe and the Americas.

Seoul also created several G20-centric institutions. Among them were regional consultative groups for the FSB to extend its outreach and agenda to include the concerns of emerging economies. It importantly promised to include civil society more systematically by including the G20 Business Summit but also more broadly by bringing in labour, other civil society and academia too.

Causes of Success and Shortcomings

Shock-Activated Vulnerability

The first cause of Seoul’s solid success was the second eurocrisis looming within six months and the familiar spectre of a 1930s-like currency war that could fuel the trade protection G20 leaders had already credibly committed to avoid. The first eurocrisis, which had erupted and gone global in May, spurred the Toronto Summit to success. Two days before the leaders arrived in Seoul, yields on Irish and Portuguese bonds spiked up to their highest levels since the euro was created in 1999, despite the promises of both governments to slash their budget deficits immediately. That same day the media reported that Greece’s public deficit in 2010 could exceed 9% of gross domestic product (GDP), rather than the 8.1% target the government had set.

The second component was the widespread talk of an existing or looming “currency war” or “currency crisis,” which also had a galvanizing effect. While no such war or crisis existed or was emerging in the material world, the slogan instantly awakened memories of the 1930s when such a conflict was real, and of the disastrous consequences for trade protectionism, economic growth and other kinds of war that came in its wake. The vivid memory led G20 finance ministers at Gyeongju and then leaders at Seoul to prevent such a war or crisis from breaking out. The result was effective crisis prevention as distinct from optimal global coordination and rebalancing.

Multilateral Institutional Failure

The second cause of Seoul’s success was the failure of the major multilateral organizations on their own and the skill of the G20 in activating the relevant resources of those organizations to help the G20 manage the global economy as the premier forum.

The built-in advances on the framework, domestic financial regulation and IFI reform were supported by the old IMF and the newer, G20-guided BCBS and FSB. In particular, the IMF, which had failed on its own to reform the voice and voice arrangements to reflect the rapidly rising powers and failed to raise the resources required for a newly interconnected world, saw its executive board quickly accept the G20 finance ministers’ agreement at Gyeongju. At Seoul the G20 leaders were similarly able to invoke the IMF’s analytical, consultative and the other functional capacities of its staff and the ministerial bodies that govern it. To a lesser extent, the support of the WTO helped the G20 advance on Doha and in repeating and keeping its anti-protectionist pledge.

Less progress came in areas where the more political and less effective UN, its functional agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization and its fragile bodies guiding climate change had the lead.

Predominant Equalizing Capabilities

The third cause of Seoul’s success was the globally predominant, internally equalizing capabilities among members of the group. The G20 continued to command about 85% of global GDP. The major emerging members led by China, India and Brazil continued to enjoy strong, at times double digit, growth. In sharp contrast, the largest advanced established, led by the United States and Japan, continued to struggle with slow and small growth.

The strongly predominant, equalizing capability among the advanced and emerging G20 members drove progress on macroeconomic policy, the framework and IFI reform. The compact G7 club within the G20 pushed that on domestic financial regulation, with an GSIFI exemption for the domestically big Asian banks. The rising capabilities of the non-G7 members drove the G20 to endorse a new domestic regulatory reform agenda, focused on the priorities of emerging countries such as controlling capital inflows and developing financial markets and regulatory and supervisory systems in developing countries.

Common Purpose

The fourth cause of Seoul’s success was the common purpose among the members and its close match with the core mission of the G20. The first such mission of promoting financial stability, even in the absence of a shock, was expressed in the advances on domestic financial regulatory reform and supervision and on financial safety nets. The second such mission of making globalization work for all fuelled the reform of the IMF and the Seoul Consensus on the “new” agenda item of development.

Political Control, Capital, Continuity and Competence

The fifth cause of Seoul’s success was the reduced political control and capital, but high continuity and competence of G20 leaders. President Lee as host was in a solid domestic political position, as were many leaders with minority or coalition governments from Canada, the UK, Germany and, much more precariously, Australia and Italy. But political weakness pervaded the U.S. and Japan, offset by the domestic political strength in Brazil, where the president elect accompanied a highly popular outgoing leader, Russia, India and China (BRICs). The balance of political strength thus favoured the BRICs and the other non-G7 members. The results were reflected in IMF reform, the new domestic regulation agenda and the slender advances on current account imbalances.

The leaders were further driven by the continuity and experience of solid majority of them in G20 summitry and the economic and business expertise of host Lee Myung-bak, former host Stephen Harper and key emerging country leaders led by India’s Manmohan Singh. Most Seoul summiteers had been at all summits since Washington, save for America’s Barack Obama, Britain’s David Cameron and Australia’s rookie Julia Guillard.

Controlled Club Participation as a Global Network Hub

Finally, the intensity of their face-to-face interaction, with five G20 summits in under two years and reinforcement from advanced-emerging plurilateral summit institutions such as APEC, drove the G20 forward in areas where crisis was not looming. As most leaders had attended those five summits, they knew how to — and why they had to — work as a group. The APEC finance ministers consensus a week before the summit helped generate Seoul’s agreements on macroeconomics and the framework. The agreement to conclude Doha in 2011 was reinforced by the previous calls for such a move by APEC finance ministers and the secretary general of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as the EU and the WTO.

References

Agence France Presse (2010a), “S. Korea Man Held over G20 Terror Threat,” November 7.

Agence France Presse (2010b), “South Korean Leader Warns of New Economic Crisis,” October 13.

Agence France Presse (2010c), “Tens of Thousands Rally in S. Korea against G20 Summit,” November 7.

Chan, Sewell (2010), “U.S. Tries to Push Seoul on Trade Deal,” International Herald Tribune, November 10, p. 19.

Elliot, Larry (2010), “U.S. Closer to Nuclear Option in the Currency War,” Guardian, October 11.

Lee, Jin-Man (2010), “Activists in South Korea Rally against G20 Summit, Police Fire Pepper Spray,” Associated Press, November 7.

McDonald, Mark (2010), “South Korea Preens in Glow of G20 Meeting,” International Herald Tribune, November 10, p. 1.

Ramstad, Evan (2010), “Currency Debate Moves on to G20,” Wall Street Journal Online, October 12.

Stelzer, Irwin (2010), “We Can’t Expect Any Breakthrough on Austerity at the G20 Summit,” Wall Street Journal Europe, October 11.

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Introduction

The Challenge