Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) president Sumit Mazumder has outlined a three-pronged agenda to boost global growth at the G20 and B20 Leaders' Session of the recently concluded B20 Turkey Summit.
The two-day B20 Turkey Summit took place during November 14 - 15 here parallel to the G20 Summit, which brought global business leaders on one platform to partner G20 leaders to discuss and deliberate global challenges and development agendas.
Mazumder said the growth in emerging world is projected to slightly fall to 4.2 percent in 2015 from 4.6 percent in 2014.
He apprehended that in the current situation, the slowdown in emerging markets such as China and Brazil has pushed the world to the brink of another recession.
However, CII President was particularly bullish about India's growth story.
"India has surpassed China in economic growth with an estimated GDP growth of 7.5 percent in 2015 vis-a-vis China's 7.1 percent. Moreover, it is projected to touch 8 percent in 2017. In short, India as an economy, consumer market and investment destination is too big to ignore now," he said.
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Mazumder outlined the steps which the G20 nations should undertake to boost global growth.
"Firstly, there is a need to be step up public and private investment in the infrastructure sector. According to B20 Infrastructure and Investment Task Force report, every year, the world spends approximately $9 trillion on infrastructure, some $2.6 trillion of which goes into economic infrastructure - transportation, power and water, and telecommunications," he said.
"Over the next 15 years, the gap in economic infrastructure is forecast to reach $15 trillion to $20 trillion. This needs to be made available through more public and private investment," he added.
The CII president pointed out that in order to facilitate this process, G20 leaders have agreed to establish a Global Infrastructure Hub with a four-year mandate.
"They have also endorsed the launch of the World Bank Group's Global Infrastructure Facility, which would attract more private sector investment in developing countries. While both these measure are welcome, there is a need to push ahead with this agenda at a more rapid pace," he said.
"Secondly, a further challenge for the world today is sluggish growth of trade. Slower expansion of Global Value Chains (GVCs), rising protectionism, and the decline in trade-intensive investment are some of the main structural restraints which the different countries. It is these issues which the G20 needs to address to accelerate global trade expansion," he added.
The CII president further said, "Thirdly, there is a need for the G20 to devise an action plan to help integrate larger numbers of developing countries and LDCs into the GVCs. In fact, in 2011, nearly 49 percent of world trade took place within GVCs, up from 36 percent in 1995."
Since the G20 Russian Presidency, Indian industry through Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has been actively engaged in all the important deliberations, which are taking place in subject-specific Task Forces.
The B20 Turkey organized itself around six taskforces: five of them - Trade, Infrastructure and Investment, Financing Growth, Employment, and Anti-Corruption - built on the work of the previous cycles' taskforces, and given the G20's priority of implementation, focused on advocacy and refinement of the existing set of B20 recommendations.
Given G20's inclusiveness priority, a new taskforce on SMEs and Entrepreneurship developed recommendations to better integrate SMEs into the global economy.