South Africa Hosts G20 Finance Meetings

Technical meetings under the Group of 20 G20 Finance Track, which focus on monitoring global macroeconomic risk and promoting sustainable growth, began with a meeting of the Framework Working Group FWG this week.

This comes after South Africa kicked off its G20 Presidency with the hosting of the G20 Sherpa and Finance Track Meetings in December last year.

National Treasury and the South African Reserve Bank are jointly responsible for overseeing the work of the G20 Finance Track.

The mandate of the FWG is to promote strong, sustainable, balanced, and inclusive growth, and does so by identifying, monitoring and assessing global macroeconomic risks, vulnerabilities and uncertainties and recommending suitable policy responses to global shocks and cross-cutting global challenges, National Treasury said in a statement.

The first day of the meeting on Monday focused on the main headwinds to global growth, ongoing supply and demand risks to inflation, and the main fiscal risks to growth and inflation. It will also discuss the economic outlook for Africa.

On Tuesday, delegates discussed the draft FWG work plan for 2025, which includes priority areas identified by the South African Presidency. These included enhancing global economic resilience in light of growth risks like fragmentation and macroeconomic imbalances strengthening macroeconomic foundations and growth reforms in light of climate change and assessing labour productivity, technological development and demographic change.

This weeks FWG meeting is the first of four to be held this year.

The remaining three meetings for this Working Group are scheduled for April, June and September, in person, in venues across the country. The outcomes of these meetings will inform discussions at the meetings of the finance and central bank deputies and finance ministers and central bank governors, Treasury said.

The G20 Leaders Summit is expected to be held in the latter half of the year.

The G20 is a grouping of developed and developing countries which form a bloc representing at least 85 of the worlds Gross Domestic Product and about 75 of international trade SAnews.gov.za