The G8 Summit: a Chance To Rethink the Ground Rules of the Global Economy
8/3/2009
In the course of an interview published by Spanish daily El Mundo on Sunday 8 March, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi discussed the Italian G8 Presidency's strategic approach to the world's current economic woes.
In an all-round conversation, the Italian Prime Minister said that one of the Italian G8 Presidency's goals is to launch an era of cooperation and coordination among the G8 member countries themselves, and between the G8 member countries and the emerging economies. Prime Minister Berlusconi believes that, without questioning capitalism itself as an economic system, the most important thing right now with the world's economy in the grip of such tremendous difficulties, is to "define shared ethical and legal standards and to thrash out new rules of transparency, propriety and integrity for international economic and financial activity". Achieving agreements of this kind, however, requires open and in-depth debate; and indeed Berlusconi has mentioned on more than one occasion recently that the Italian Presidency is bent on building a "variable-geometry" G8, in other words a G8 that is "inclusive, open to the emerging economies and capable of dialoguing with the world's poorer regions".
With a view to boosting North-South dialogue and to reducing the imbalance between rich and poor countries, the Italian presidency is also thinking of certain specific measures for countries in difficulty: "We will be proposing the Detax mechanism to the G8 countries," the Italian prime minister told El Mundo, explaining that Detax "is a tax mechanism in which a part of tax revenue is set aside and earmarked for developing countries".
Finally, Italy's strategy also includes a proposal for "a new kind of aid philosophy involving more tools and more players, including private-sector players. I firmly believe in a model of sustainable capitalism designed to boost the prosperity not only of current generations but of future generations as well," the Italian Prime Minister said.
