Brown calls for G20 cooperation on economy

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-09-18 13:21

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said cooperation between nations at next week's G20 summit will be crucial to ensure global economic recovery, the prime minister's office announced on Thursday.

Speaking ahead of a European Council meeting in Brussels, Brown said he would tell his fellow European Union (EU) leaders that now was not the time for "business as usual" and a failure to introduce fiscal stimulus packages could derail recovery.

He called on the G20 to sign up to a global agreement on how international economic cooperation will proceed in future.

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Brown said: "There are big choices ahead. What is clear is that the recovery cannot be taken for granted. Its achievement is not automatic."

"We need to make a choice whether to maintain the emergency action to ensure the recovery is not wrecked or derailed or to risk choking off the recovery by failing to see through the coordinated global fiscal expansion that we have put in place," he said.

In addition, the prime minister said that there was mutual interest in agreeing a long-term plan to end public funding for banks and to curb excessive bank bonuses.

"I am appalled, and I believe that people have been appalled by the suggestion in some institutions and their practices that they simply want to return to the policies of the past," Brown said, " there is no support in any part of the world for failing to take the action that is necessary, and I believe we will now be able to agree on a structure for how bonuses should be examined in future. "

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