Gordon Brown: finance ministers must add Covid burden-sharing to their G20 to do list

Gordon Brown: finance ministers must add Covid burden-sharing to their G20 to do list

The writer is a former UK prime minister

It is often said that there are two kinds of finance ministers: those who fail and those who get out just in time. And, in my experience, what most often brings ministers down is the unexpected; those things you omit to plan for that leave you struggling to keep up with events.

Predictably, the crowded agenda of today’s first G20 finance ministers meeting under Indonesia’s presidency will cover most aspects of our unbalanced global recovery and our ever more fragile geopolitics: the fallout from Ukraine, not least on energy supplies, unexpectedly high inflation, rising protectionism and a downgrading on likely growth, as well as the future of sanctions, given the Afghan famine.

But the world will be a more dangerous place, and global recovery impeded, if an item that has been at the top of finance ministers’ agendas for the past two years — the pandemic and the financing of the global health response — is downgraded to “any other competent business” out of a misguided complacency that we are now in the Covid endgame.

The inescapable truth is that the very global health organisations that we will continue to rely on to contain the pandemic are running