The G20 is Going to Try One More Time to Get Everyone Together to Come Up With a Debt Relief Plan for Poor Countries
Finance Ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 will convene an extraordinary meeting on November 13th in a bid to come up with a more robust debt relief plan for the world’s poorest countries. A couple of weeks ago when this same group got together, they weren’t able to come up with much beyond a lowest-common-denominator agreement that extended the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) by 6 months . They also agreed at that last meeting to a common framework to restructure bilateral debt, an issue that China initially opposed. Now, at this upcoming conference, analysts will be checking if the ministers apply that common framework to enact more sweeping debt relief initiatives for several countries at once, rather than on a one-by-one basis as they’ve done to date. Regardless, China will remain an obstacle. While Beijing insists that it’s committed to working with the DSSI framework, it has doing so bilaterally with borrowing countries rather than coordi