We Place High Value On India's G20 Leadership: IMF MD

India's leadership of the G20 is critical at a time when the world is facing continued economic slowdown and social distress, the International Monetary Fund (IMF)'s Managing Director said on Thursday.

“India, as G20 president, remains among the countries that perform better than the global average, and by a significant margin,” IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters during a media roundtable.

On 1 December, India formally assumed the G20 Presidency. The next G20 Leaders' Summit at the heads of state and government level is scheduled for 9 and 10 September in New Delhi.

“We place a high value on India's leadership of the G20. Because this is such an important time for the world to protect its own well-being by safeguarding the global economy as a whole, I hope India will do that tremendous global service of keeping us together,” she said. Georgieva also praised India for its embrace of digitisation.

“What we see working extremely well for India is how the country has taken digitization, which was accelerated by Covid-19 and turned it into a strong comparative advantage, both for public policy and for private sector growth,” the IMF Managing Director responded to a question.

For public policy, she noted that the combination of digital ID and digital public infrastructure allows India to move policy support on a digital platform and target those who are recipients of the support extremely well, as well as become a shining example of vaccinations done in a prioritised and highly effective manner.

“On the private side, because it has become a fertile ground for very rapid expansion of branded financing and enterprises. And that India intends to use the G-20 to strengthen its comparative advantage,” she said.

One of the G20 priorities, according to Georgieva, is how to make digitisation built on a public platform, a public infrastructure that allows everyone to plug in and significantly reduces digitisation costs, and how this can be a source of growth and employment. That is unquestionably one area.

She pointed out that India has gone through some difficult reforms that are now paying off. She also said that the country is facing climate challenges, with a significant impact on agriculture due to the country's extreme vulnerability to climate shocks, particularly droughts and high temperatures.

“Of course, developments in Asia have an impact on India. One of the countries — Sri Lanka is a neighbour and Pakistan is a neighbour — is a volatile country. Of course, the fact that China has slowed down so dramatically has impacted the rest of Asia. If I were in India today, I would be more concerned about what is going on in the rest of the world and how it will affect me than about domestic factors,” Georgieva explained.