G24 communiqué analysis Annual Meetings 2025
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Article summary
The Group of 24 represents a block of some of the most important Emerging Markets and Developing Economies (EMDE)s, including India, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa. At this year’s Annual Meetings, the G24 communiqué covered a plethora of pressing topics but failed to offer bold political pressure essential for transformative change.
The Intergovernmental Group of Twenty-Four (G24) released its communiqué for the 2025 IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings on 14 October – at the same time as dim prospects were published in the IMF’s World Economic Outlook, which reported a slowdown in global growth once again. With the Bretton Woods Institutions noticeably bowing to the pressure of the new US administration’s regressive demands (see Dispatch Annuals 2025), civil society and other actors are desperate to see progressive solutions to the mountain of development problems facing the world, supported especially by borrowing countries and crucial groups such as the G24. Whilst this year’s communiqué noted concern for a breadth of issues, bold statements were lacking.
As the impact of numerous conflicts across the globe continues to be catastrophic, deeply fatal and far from justice in many cases, the Group of 24 acknowledged the immense humanitarian suffering and stressed the importance of “international law and strengthening the enforcement of the principle of peaceful settlement of disputes as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations” – notable language at a time where faith and support for the United Nations (and indeed international law) is faltering (see Observer Autumn 2025). On the global economic outlook, the statement noted constraints to growth due to debt vulnerabilities and called for further improvement of the G20 Common Framework for Debt Treatments such as “focus on fiscal sustainability, provision of additional concessional financing, strengthening debt management, enhancing debt transparency, and improving country risk assessments and methodology by credit-rating agencies.”
Address to the US
In what could be considered a nod to this year’s harsh tariff policy under US President Trump, and indeed in a political climate of anti-immigration sentiment which World Bank President Ajay Banga warily responded to in recent plenary speeches on the need to control “mass migration”, the group did highlight the impossible situation many economies are facing in seeking economic growth, noting the weight of “deteriorating terms-of-trade, reduced export volumes, and declining foreign currency earnings, including remittances.” In the face of such difficult circumstances, the group urged donors to reverse the concerning trend of declining Official Development Assistance (ODA) and to honour their commitments and increase their support “in light of rising needs.”
On governance, the group expressed keenness for the IMF to ensure a “timely completion” of the 16th General Review of Quotas and called on members to “resolve the impediments” to the use of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs), upon which it called the IMF to consider exploring a mechanism for the regular issuance of SDRs. On the World Bank’s Shareholding Review, the statement stressed the importance of enhancing voice and representation of developing countries across all World Bank institutions, while “upholding the framework provided by the Lima Principle especially on protection of voting power of the smallest and poorest countries.”
Private sector and who else?
On the World Bank Group’s Evolution Roadmap, the group welcomed the Bank’s creation of “more and better jobs” and private sector development for economic transformation, and notably called recent securitisation initiatives by the Bank “promising for private capital mobilisation”, though caveating this with the need to ensure alternative funds and types of financing remained available, such as the Framework of Financial Incentives, Liveable Planet Fund, hybrid capital, portfolio guarantees, and enhanced callable capital, in order to mobilise additional lending capacity. Despite the strong support for private finance solutions, the statement did strongly advise the importance of additional long-term public finance, noting that multilateral development banks “should remain the cornerstone of long-term public finance for development,” a message that seems increasingly lost by the institutions.
