Finance minister Enoch Godongwana and Reserve Bank governor Lesetja Kganyago and their teams head to Washington DC this weekend for multilateral meetings that could be among the most momentous and difficult in many years.
They will as usual attend the IMF and World Bank’s spring meetings, which open on Monday. But this year’s meetings are special for SA which, as Group of Twenty (G20) president, will be hosting the G20 Finance Track meeting. This is the second of four Finance Track meetings which bring the group’s finance ministers and central bank governors together during the year.
The G20 is expected to provide a particularly important forum for talks between the US and the world’s other leading economies amid heightened trade and geopolitical tensions.
“The importance of the G20 is it gives the only platform for finance ministers from the G7 [Group of Seven] and the rest of the world to get together and exchange views on the global economy and the multilateral system that underpins how we co-ordinate on economic policy as well as on trade and other matters,” Treasury director-general Duncan Pieterse said this week.
The plan is to make the global economy discussion as constructive as possible, with more time than usual allowed for the finance ministers and central bank governors — not least the US — to share perspectives. SA will also share a document on Africa’s growth and development challenges for discussion by the G20.
The IMF’s updated economic forecasts, in its flagship World Economic Outlook report on Tuesday, will be closely watched given the expected fallout of the Trump tariff wars. The spring meetings also come as the Trump administration threatens to cut funding to multilateral institutions, potentially making the IMF and World Bank board meetings scheduled for next weekend unusually tense.
IMF MD Kristalina Georgieva delivers her curtain raiser speech on Thursday and a series of seminars and sideline events begin on Monday before the board meetings.
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