we share an interest in china’s integration into the world economy, which is essential for china’s development.
if we are to maintain europe’s openness to china, we must be able to show that china is open to europe.
so we share an interest in an international system governed by rules and norms.
we share an interest in effective cooperative governance, including for the world economy.
we share an interest in fighting protectionism
and in a co-ordinated rebalancing between surplus and deficit countries.
these interests, those responsibilities are both economic and political.
let me take each in turn.
economic responsibilities
first, economic responsibilities.
let’s get straight to the point.
the world economy has begun to grow again after the crisis.
but that growth is very uneven.
led by china, asia and other emerging markets are growing quickly.
but in much of the advanced world growth is slow and fragile and unemployment stubbornly high.
we should not be surprised at this.
the crisis has damaged many advanced economies and weakened their financial sectors.
they face major structural and fiscal adjustments to rebalance their economies.
this is true of my own country.
we know what steps we need to take to restore the public finances and rebalance our economy towards greater saving and investment and greater exports.
and we have begun to take them.
but for the world economy to be able to grow strongly again – and to grow without creating the dangerous economic and financial instabilities that led to the crisis, we need more than just adjustment in the advanced world.
the truth is that some countries with current account surpluses have been saving too much
while others like mine with deficits have been saving too little.
and the result has been a dangerous tidal wave of money going from one side of the globe to the other.
we need a more balanced pattern of global demand and supply, a more balanced pattern of global saving and investment.
now sometimes when you hear people talk about economic imbalances, it can seem as though countries that are successful at exporting are being blamed for their success.
that’s absolutely not the case.
we all share an interest and a responsibility to co-operate to secure strong and balanced global growth.
there is no greater illustration of this than what happened to china as the western banking system collapsed.
chinese exports fell 12 per cent
growth dropped to its lowest point in more than a decade
and some 20 million jobs were lost in the chinese export sector.