G20 summit should look for coordinated approach to global growth: Former British PM Gordon Brown

LONDON - The upcoming G20 summit in China should look for a coordinated approach to global growth to get the world economy moving forward, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said.

"It's a good thing that China is chairing it. I hope you have a successful meeting. You've got to look at how you can coordinate growth across the world, because growth is far too slow," Brown told Xinhua and other audience members at a recent cultural event.

Brown, a British Labour Party politician, served as Britain's prime minister from 2007 to 2010. In 2009, he hosted the G20 London summit, amid the global financial crisis.

"There are too many people unemployed; there is too little capacity to develop the economy," he said, pointing out that the European economies are barely growing at all, and the American growth has been very slow since the recession.

"So if people are going to be in jobs, if they are going to be more prosperous, if we are going to actually build for the future, then we need a far more coordinated approach to growth," he suggested.

On global trade, he said it is growing far more slowly and needs to be sped up with new trade agreements.

"World trade was growing at 8 percent before the recession. It was growing at twice the rate of the world growth. People were trading more and more with each other. World trade is now half global growth, and it's about 2 to 3 percent at most, and it is growing far more slowly than at anytime in the last 40 or 50 years," he explained.

"We must speed up world trade. There should be a world trade agreement," he urged.

On globalization, Brown called on governments and world leaders to give globalization leadership and "a human face."

"If you can prove that globalization had leaders, that it was being led, and there was a human face to it...then I think people would feel more sanguine about cooperating between the economies including within Europe," the former prime minister told Xinhua.

"And we would say, look, we've got better balance between the autonomy we want as individual countries and the cooperation that we definitely need, the sharing we need, to make the world economy work better for everyone," he added.

In a recent article for the Financial Times, Brown also urged leaders to make the case for globalization at the G20 summit.

"At a minimum, September's G20 summit should show that global cooperation can make a difference. To reinvigorate trade and stimulate a still-sluggish world economy, it should agree a global growth pact founded on a coordinated approach to monetary and fiscal policy and structural reform," he wrote.