Global recovery requires political courage

By George Osborne, Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Wayne Swan
GLOBAL TIMES
The authors are respectively the Canadian finance minister, the South African finance minister, the UK chancellor of the exchequer, the deputy prime minister and finance minister of Singapore, and the deputy prime minister and treasurer of Australia. opinion@globaltimes.com.cn

The world faces a crisis of confidence. We all knew the recovery from the global financial crisis would be prolonged. However, the more serious malaise today is the lack of confidence in efforts by governments to address the structural problems that underpin weak growth, high unemployment and unsustainable fiscal balance sheets.

Global coordination in the recovery is inevitably harder than coordinated reflation at the peak of the crisis, because the necessary reforms are more difficult to achieve and sustain. But the biggest barriers are political not economic, so what is needed is political leadership and courage. More short-term fixes without serious medium-term commitments will only weaken confidence further.

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