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Assembly President calls on China to support reform of financial institutions

Assembly President calls on China to support reform of financial institutions

General Assembly President Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann
The President of the General Assembly today appealed to China to support United Nations initiatives to transform international financial, economic, monetary and trade policies in response to the current global economic and financial crises.

“The enormous economic crisis that we face today threatens to tip millions, perhaps billions, of our people into poverty of catastrophic proportions,” General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto told a gathering at the China Foreign Affairs University in Beijing.

He told the meeting that over 150 participating States at the Financing for Development Conference in Doha at the end of last year had called for a high-level international conference to review the international financial and monetary architecture, including a possible expansion in the representation of institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The 192-member General Assembly has decided that its President, Mr. D’Escoto, should be responsible for organizing the conference to be held in June.

He announced today that he had included Yu Yongding, the Director of the Institute of World Economics and Politics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as a member of the commission of experts to assist UN Member States in identifying problems and recommending solutions that will be considered in the run up to the June conference.

Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 and is a former chief economist at the World Bank, will chair the Commission of Experts on Reforms of the International Monetary and Financial System, which will suggest steps that Member States can take to secure a more stable global economic order.

“The coming June conference represents an historic opportunity for the G77 and China,” said Mr. D’Escoto.

“A new system is possible that can truly facilitate the integration of the developing countries into global decision making and ensure that the interests and concerns of all counties are taken into account,” he added.

The Assembly President noted that the transformation of China as an economic powerhouse has captivated the world, and that it has “demonstrated what wise management, forward planning and cooperation – particularly South-South cooperation – can do.”