THE Indian Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, while addressing the Plenary Session of the G20 Summit in Seoul yesterday, said that the G20 has only been in existence for two years, yet it can claim several important successes which has led to its emergence as the premier forum for international economic cooperation.

Dr Singh said that emerging market countries especially Asia have on the whole done well. The Indian economy has rebounded fairly well from the crisis. India grew at 9% in the four years prior to the crisis, but slowed down to 6.7% in the 2008-09. The economy recovered to 7.4% growth in 2009-10 and is likely to grow at 8.5% in 2010-11. He hoped to achieve 9% in 2011-12.

However, he said that high unemployment in industrialized countries threatens a revival of protectionist sentiment, especially since the use of conventional monetary and fiscal tools to revive the economy has been exhausted. Uncertainty about the prospects of industrialized countries affects the investment climate and dampens the medium term growth prospects of emerging market countries. All this suggests that much remains to be done to bring our economies back to the path of strong, sustainable and balanced growth.

The Prime MInister observed that the Mutual Assessment Process adopted in Pittsburgh was a unique G20 initiative to achieve such coordination. Then came the outcome of the first stage in Toronto, at the level of country groupings. It was expected to move to the second stage of considering country specific recommendations by the time of the Seoul Summit.

''We are not there yet, and for good reasons. It is not easy to reach agreement on what are sustainable current account balances for individual countries given the structural differences across countries, the many uncertainties that prevail, and the multiple goals that each country has to balance. It is even more difficult to agree on a particular combination of policies to achieve these targets.,'' he added.