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Postcrisis Growth and Development
failures mainly with investments in technical solutions will not work. Food and nutrition security must have high priority among the development issues on the agenda of the upcoming G-20 summits. Hak-Su Kim summarizes that the piece by Delgado and co-authors rightly focuses on long-term policies to ensure food security in developing countries by scaling up efforts to spur agricultural productivity, improve links from farmers to markets, and reduce risk and vulnerability. However, he argues that demographic dynamics are highly relevant to this discussion as population will reach about 7 billion in 2010 and the United Nations estimates that in approximately 35 years the population could be as high as 10 billion. With this rapid increase in global population, Kim contends, we may expect shortages in aggregate food availability and a growing threat of hunger and malnutrition in relation to food requirements. The Asian solution to the food security problem was the Green Revolution. Kim concludes that the agricultural landscape can change in unpredictable ways and that no general strategic body can pick up new agenda items and assign them to organizations. The G-20’s role should be to facilitate the creation of a body independent of current institutions to avoid creating a conflict of interest which could be structured along the lines that Sourang proposes. Inclusive Finance In chapter 10, Peer Stein, Bikki Randhawa, and Nina Bilandzic present a comprehensive analysis of inclusive finance by reviewing key trends, challenges, and opportunities for advancing financial inclusion and propose major high-level policy recommendations for consideration by the G-20. They show that the global gap in access to and use of financial services remains a challenge. Two-thirds of the adult population in developing countries, or 2.7 billion people, lack access to basic formal financial services, such as savings or checking accounts. The largest share of the unbanked live in Sub-Saharan Africa (only 12 percent of population is banked) and South Asia (only 24 percent of population is banked). Stein and his co-authors argue that the gap in access to finance is equally important for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), which are the main drivers of job creation in emerging markets. SMEs are 30 percent more likely than large firms to rate financing constraints as a major obstacle to growth. Small firms are at the highest disadvantage: only 18 percent of
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