G20 ready to aspire to faster global growth

By Wayne Cole and Louise Egan

SYDNEY (Reuters) - The world's top economies are on the verge of adopting a soft target of adding an extra 2 percentage points to global growth over five years at a meeting in Sydney, signalling optimism that the worst of crisis-era austerity was behind them.

The deal will come as the Group 20 finance ministers and central bankers struggle with the impact of the Federal Reserve's tapering of its monetary stimulus on emerging markets and giving developing nations a greater say in the International Monetary Fund.

"The G20 is likely to agree on aiming at reforms and polices that could increase growth by 2 percent on top of the current trajectory in five years. It will be agreed by 1330 (0230 GMT)," a G20 official said, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the growth goal would be framed as aspiration rather than a hard target.

The two-day meeting ends later on Sunday with a round of news conferences by top officials, including European Central Bank President Mario Draghi and IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.

The growth plan borrows wholesale from an IMF paper prepared for the G20 meeting, which estimated that structural reforms would raise world growth by about 0.5 percentage points per year over the next five years, boosting global output by $2.25 trillion.

The IMF has forecast global growth of 3.75 percent for this year and 4 percent in 2015.

The target remains vague at the moment, with no road map on how nations intend to get there or repercussions if they never arrive. The aim was to come up with the goal now, then have each country develop an action plan and a growth strategy for delivery at a November summit of G20 leaders in Brisbane.

Agreeing on any goal is a step forward for the group that has failed in the past to agree on fiscal and current account targets. And it would it would mark a sea change from recent meetings where the debate was still on where their focus should lie: on growth or budget austerity.

It would also be something of a feather in the cap of Australian Treasurer Joe Hockey, who spearheaded the push for growth in the face of some scepticism, notably from Germany.

Australia is acting as president of the G20 this year, following Russia in 2013 and ahead of Turkey next year.

SINK OR SWIM

The group seems to have had less success in heeding calls for greater coordination among global central banks to avoid surprises that could roil emerging markets.

Canada's Flaherty said he did not expect the G20 communique due later on Sunday to include any commitment for advanced economies to communicate monetary policy more clearly.

There was never much expectation the Federal Reserve would consider actually slowing the pace of tapering, but its emerging peers had at least been hoping for more cooperation on policy.

Raghuram Rajan, the head of India's central bank, on Sunday again said the major developed nations had to take heed of countries vulnerable to the unwinding of monetary stimulus.

"I don't think we can proceed forward saying everybody is in their own boat and they sink or swim alone," he told the Australian Financial Review.

Rajan also criticised the United States for failing to implement a four-year-old plan to recapitalise the IMF and give more say on its running to developing nations.

India, along with China, Brazil and Russia, has long lobbied for increased voting power in the IMF to reflect their growing share of the world economy.

(Additional reporting by Cecile Lefort, Ian Chua, and Matt Siegel; Editing by John Mair and Tomasz Janowski)