Italy's Mario Draghi drives G-20 post-pandemic agenda

WHILE Italy is one of the G-20's least-prominent states, Prime Minister Mario Draghi is hoping to use his own political prominence to help the nation hold in 2021 one of the most consequential annual presidencies of the club of world powers, kicking this off on May 21 with a global health summit.

It is not just the G-20 this year that will shine a spotlight on Italy. In addition, the country is the United Kingdom's partner in the organisation of COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference. The preparatory meeting of that hugely important environmental conference will take place in Italy in September and October, before the main event in Scotland in November.

May 21's major health event, organised by Italy's G-20 presidency in partnership with the European Commission, was co-chaired by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. It saw, amid the continuing pandemic, leaders adopt a series of key measures, including a declaration recommending voluntary actions to boost coronavirus vaccine production.

The most ambitious proposal, however, came from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which proposed a US$50 billion project aimed at ending the pandemic by vaccinating 40 per cent of people globally by end of 2021, and at least 60 per cent by the first half of 2022. Doing so, IMF officials say, would inject the equivalent of US$9 trillion into the global economy by 2025 due to a faster resumption of economic activity.

Other key items announced by Dr von der Leyen include three new manufacturing hubs in Africa this year to boost long-term production of vaccines. Several key drugmakers also declared that they will provide large supplies of at-cost vaccines to developing nations this year to try to redress the current global imbalance.

May 21's event, and the important announcements at it, highlights that this year could be one of the most important G-20s since the 2009 meeting in London amid the international financial crisis of just over a decade ago. Then, the multilateral forum, with UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown in the chair, coordinated an approximately US$1 trillion stimulus package to bolster the global economy at a time of troubles.

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Building from the Saudi presidency, one of the prizes Dr Draghi is seeking this year is development of a genuinely global, comprehensive response to the pandemic which has been stymied to date by the lack of interest in this outcome from some key world leaders. This includes former US president Donald Trump who decided last year to play golf rather than attend all the G-20 sessions of the Saudi-hosted leadership meeting, including one on pandemic preparedness, following his decision last year to pull the United States out of the World Health Organization (WHO).

He also helped fuel, with his comments at last year's G-20 event that he wanted to "vaccinate America first", a then-surging vaccine nationalism that WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week had become a "vaccine apartheid". The latest data here is stark with high-income countries accounting for 15 per cent of the world's population but having 45 per cent of the world's vaccines, while low and lower-middle countries account for almost half of the world's people, but have received just 17 per cent of the world's vaccines.

With Mr Trump now out of office, and Western countries split on the issue of issue of vaccine patent waivers with Germany strongly against, another key division within the G-20 in recent times is between China and the United States. Mr Trump railed last year over what he calls the "China virus", and at a key G-20 session Chinese President Xi Jinping focused his remarks on US trade barriers rather than a domestic Chinese fiscal stimulus as the best route to growth, urging G-20 members to cut tariffs, remove barriers and facilitate the unfettered flow of trade.

BRIDGING THE GAPS

So even now, not all G-20 leaders have fully embraced the advice of Dr Tedros last year to come together to find joint solutions to coronavirus and "ignite a new global movement" to ensure it never happens again. In a context of criticisms that world leaders have failed to produce a quicker response to the pandemic, the WHO chief asserted that "you have to come together to confront the defining health crisis of our time: we are at war with a virus that threatens to tear us apart - if we let it" - stressing that the pandemic is a powerful reminder of our interconnectedness and vulnerabilities, respecting no borders.

While there are some signs of a bridging of these gaps, Dr Draghi still has much work to do this year. There are also wider concerns too about how easy it will be to implement the agreements on May 21 and later this year. While the G-20 is widely seen to have seized the mantle from the G-7 as the premier forum for international economic cooperation and global governance, it has failed so far to realise the full scale of the ambition some have thrust upon it, in part, because it has no formal mechanisms to ensure enforcement of agreements by world leaders.

Moreover, at a time of a continuing global health emergency, there also remain concerns by states outside the G-20 about the club's legitimacy, and composition which was originally selected in the late 1990s by the United States along with G-7 colleagues. While states were nominally selected according to criteria such as population, gross domestic product etc, criticism has been made of omissions such as Nigeria, sometimes called the "giant of Africa", which has three times South Africa's population.

This issue has been picked up by the host of the 2009 summit, Dr Brown, in the context of coronavirus. He has urged the G-20 to work much more closely with the 193-member state UN to tackle the pandemic.

Nevertheless, whether or not the G-20 lives up in 2021 to some of Dr Draghi's high expectations, it continues to be a forum that is generally highly prized by its members as May 21's session showed. While the Italian presidency has the potential to be one of the most important since 2009, much will now depend on whether intra-G-20 divisions ameliorate, or grow, in the run-up to October's leadership summit.

• The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.