Nazarbayev compared saving global economy with dollars to firefighting with petrol

Nazarbayev compared attempts to save the global economy with dollars to firefighting with petrol, Tengrinews.kz reports from the 5th Astana Economic Forum. “A lot of money is being channeled into saving certain national economies and maintaining the balance of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Unfortunately, these are the only measures taken by G8 and G20, but each new billion of dollars can cause a billion of new social problems. It is like firefighting with petrol in fire hoses,” Nazarbayev expressed his opinion on the situation in the global economy. “The International Labor Organization made a statement on the threat of the global unemployment. It has significantly exceeded last century’s values in the leading European countries: Italy (8.5 percent unemployment rate), Great Britain (8.3 percent), Germany (6 percent) and France (9.7 percent). These four locomotives have the total of over 11 million unemployed with a half of them being young people. There are even more unemployed people in other countries of the European Union. Every third person of employable age in the world, or 1.1 billion people, have no job at all or live with a family out of less than $2 a day,” Nazarbayev said. All this and especially the half-way manner of the global anti-crisis measures is, according to Nazarbayev, a clear example of the other kind of the core crisis: corrosion of the international relations. “Creation of G20 group significantly enlarged the range of the dialog on the global economy reform. But currently, 4 years after the first summit of the anti-crisis group, this format turns out to be insufficient. Many world leaders finally agreed at the last Global Economic Forum in Davos that something has to be done with capitalism, or with its contemporary neoliberal modification." By Renat Tashkinbayev