Macron’s Paris summit seeks new life for global finance agenda

Paris, June 20 (BNA): French President Emmanuel Macron will host a summit on Thursday and Friday to lay out a roadmap for debt relief for low-income countries while freeing up more money for climate finance.

The summit brings dozens of leaders together in the French capital for a high-level consensus on how to advance a number of initiatives currently struggling in bodies such as the G20, International Monetary Fund, World Bank and United Nations.

From debt relief to climate finance, many of the topics on the agenda dealt with proposals from a group of developing countries, led by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Motley, dubbed the “Bridgetown Initiative”.

“We’re moving into a world — I would call it the Bridgetown Finance System — (that) recognizes that we have to massively scale up the public sector and focus on building resilience and adaptation because it’s hard to fund that any other way,” said Avinash Persaud, Motley Fool’s special envoy on climate finance. .

Although no binding decisions are expected, officials involved in planning the summit said some strong commitments should be made on financing for poor countries.

Nearly eighty years after the creation of the Bretton Woods agreement of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, leaders aim to squeeze more financing from multilateral lenders for countries that need it most.

In particular, there should be an announcement of achieving the $100 billion target which will be made available through the International Monetary Fund to countries at risk, the officials said.

The plan, first agreed two years ago at an African finance summit in Paris, calls for rich governments to lend unused special drawing rights to the International Monetary Fund to in turn lend to poor countries.

Governments are also looking for ways to allow the World Bank to use leverage to lend to more poor countries without jeopardizing its top credit rating.

“We want to go further and we should be able to set targets to put more public money on the table,” a source in the French presidency said.

MI