OREANDA-NEWS. Vladimir Putin summed up the results of the G20 Summit and answered journalists’ questions.
VLADIMIR PUTIN: Ladies and gentlemen, friends!

To start with, I’d like to say that in the five years of its existence the G20 has really become an effective mechanism for elaborating and coordinating common approaches to the global economy and finance among the world’s leading countries.

We have managed to achieve stabilization after the peak of the crisis in 2008–2009 and consolidate our efforts to ensure balanced and sustainable development of the global economy.

The global economy is doing better than it was five years ago. Economic growth is picking up, but the risks are still very high. This is why at the start of our G20 Presidency we set the task of promoting growth and creating new jobs primarily by encouraging investment, enacting effective regulations and increasing confidence in the markets.

These priorities have allowed us to ensure continuity in the G20’s activities and to make serious progress in all key areas during Russia’s Presidency. I’d like to thank my G20 colleagues for their productive cooperation. I’d also like to thank our outreach partners – all of them took an active part in discussing Russian initiatives and played a major role in enhancing the transparency and effectiveness of our joint efforts. The results achieved during Russia’s Presidency have been recorded in the St. Petersburg G20 Leaders’ Declaration and its amendments adopted today.

We were able to find many important practical solutions both for the international community and the Russian economy, and to propose our action plan for finding and encouraging new sources of growth in practically every sphere. Thus, we have reached consensus on the need to combine a policy of maintaining the necessary economic growth rates with medium-term standards and country-specific standards for the fiscal consolidation strategy.

The summit has adopted the St Petersburg Action Plan. It sets medium-term goals for reducing budget deficits and conducting comprehensive structural reforms for each country. These include urgent measures to regulate the labour market and taxation, develop human capital, upgrade infrastructure and regulate commodity markets.

These measures should strengthen the financial markets’ trust in our plans and at the same time encourage investors to co-finance the real sector of the economy and development. We see this as a guarantee for the lasting stabilization of the global and national economies.

Major progress has been achieved in stimulating employment. The G20 leaders have approved decisions taken at the meetings of labour and employment ministers and during their joint meeting with finance ministers. I’d like to point out that this was the first such meeting in G20 history.

We have formulated the task of creating quality jobs with a focus on stimulating employment of vulnerable groups, primarily young people, women, people with special needs and several other groups.

For the first time ever, we have proposed an integrated approach to formulating labour market policy, in particular by tying the task of creating quality jobs to economic development goals, taking into account macroeconomic, financial and social conditions as well as the connection between the labour market and investments, the budget and the fiscal policy.

This approach will enable us to balance demand and supply in the labour market and to create conditions for the development of business and investment in creating jobs, training personnel, and ensuring the social protection of workers. The issue of financing investment was a priority for the Russian Presidency and for the G20 as a whole. We have developed a programme for doing research and preparing recommendations on improving the investment climate and encouraging long-term investment.

Considerable results have been achieved within the framework of this program, and they have been approved at this summit meeting. These are above all the high-level principles of participation of institutional investors in financing long-term investment projects.

Critical decisions have been made at the summit on reforming tax policy in order to fight tax evasion, for example through the use of tax havens. This issue has come into focus this year. We have approved a joint action plan on base erosion and tax evasion, and agreed to work out a new and multifaceted standard for information sharing in the tax sphere.

In trade, the G20 has reaffirmed its support of a multilateral trade system and the World Trade Organization. We have also agreed to limit protectionist policies in global trade and extend the countries’ respective commitments until 2017. We will also work to increase transparency of regional trade agreements and to have them comply with the WTO requirements.

Noticeable progress has been made in reforming global financial regulation, including regulation of the banking sector – the so called Basel III standard – and in reforming over-the-counter derivatives markets. We have also seen progress with regard to systemically important financial institutions. These achievements were partly due to the fact that the Financial Stability Board was established as a fully-fledged international organization this year.

We have agreed to see to it that national policies to improve financial stability do not lead to unreasonably high regulatory costs for foreign players on national financial markets, let alone fragmentation of these markets. Additional analysis of the financial sector reforms’ influence on economic growth needs to be conducted.

This year was the first time in G20 history that an accountability report on the implementation of G20 development commitments has been prepared. The release of this report should first of all make the G20’s work more transparent. With a little help from you, we all – the public in our countries – will be able to better understand what the G20 does and what results, exactly, it is trying to achieve. I hope this will help extend our positive cooperation experience mainly to low-income countries.

On the whole, in the three years since the Seoul multiyear action plan was adopted in 2010, the G20 has seen tangible progress in development assistance.

The G20 leaders have also approved the St. Petersburg Development Strategy, which defines five priorities for the G20’s further work to assist low-income countries – food security, financial inclusion and financial literacy, building modern infrastructure (including energy infrastructure), developing human capital and mobilizing domestic resources in emerging economies.