World Bank president Robert Zoellick called on G20 leaders yesterday to set an ambitious agenda of “responsible globalization” at this week’s summit.
Zoellick said the summit should include efforts to promote more balanced growth with financial stability, development and climate change, rather than the narrow focus set at the last G20 summit in London in April.
“The challenge for the G20 is how do you sustain the momentum and co-operation they were able to achieve when staring into the abyss at the time of the London summit as the crisis wanes?” Zoellick told the Financial Times.
US President Barack Obama hosts G20 leaders in Pittsburgh starting on Thursday for two days of talks aimed at tightening regulations to ensure that a similar global financial crisis never happens again.
“The core message of Pittsburgh needs to be more than implementing the agenda set in London, which was mostly about financial stability or reforming bankers’ bonuses,” he said.
“I would like the G20 to talk about responsible globalization,” Zoellick said.
“That would capture balanced global growth, financial stability, climate change, help for the poorest including our proposal for a new facility to help countries cope with economic shocks not of their own making,” he said.
Zoellick also warned of rising protectionism and called for a robust G20 response.
“We have a low-grade fever of trade tensions and the temperature is starting to rise,” he told the paper.
He urged the US and China to settle their dispute over imports. The US last week imposed punitive tariffs of 35 percent on Chinese-made tire imports — a move that prompted Beijing to lodge a complaint at the WTO.
The World Bank last week urged the G20 to step up aid to the poorest countries, saying they lack billions of dollars for critical spending to weather the global economic crisis.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
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