纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英印度峰会开幕在即世界还需要G20吗

The annual Group of 20 summit brings together world leaders in pursuit of a lofty goal: coordinating policy for the global economy.

一年一度的20国集团(G20)峰会让世界各国领导人齐聚一堂，共同追求一个宏大目标：协调全球经济政策。

But how much progress has the G20 made toward its ambitions? And what can be expected from this year’s meeting in India on Saturday and Sunday?

但G20在实现其雄心壮志方面取得了多少进展呢？今年的峰会将于周六和周日在印度举行，我们对这次会议可以抱持怎样的期待？

The agenda in New Delhi includes climate change, economic development and debt burdens in low-income countries, as well as inflation spurred by Russia’s war in Ukraine. If members can reach consensus on any or all of these subjects, they will produce an official joint declaration at the end.

新德里峰会的议程包括气候变化、经济发展和低收入国家的债务负担，以及俄罗斯在乌克兰的战争引发的通货膨胀。如果成员能够就其中任何一个或全部问题达成共识的话，他们将在会议最后发表一份正式的联合声明。

Then what? Often, not much, when it comes to real-world results. Most of the grouping’s joint statements since it formed in 1999 have been dominated by resolutions as solid as gas fumes, with no clear consequences when nations underperform.

然后呢？通常，并不会有太多现实世界的结果。自1999年成立以来，该组织的大多数联合声明都是由不具强制性的决议主导，各国即使没能实现目标，也不会有什么明确的后果。

One example: At the 2021 summit in Rome, G20 leaders said they would limit global warming with “meaningful and effective actions,” highlighting a pledge to end the financing of coal power plants overseas.

以2021年的罗马峰会为例，G20领导人表示，他们将以“有意义和有效的行动”限制全球变暖，并强调承诺，不再为海外燃煤电厂提供融资。

But the communiqué left out domestic coal investments. And in 2022, coal-fired power generation worldwide reached a new high, according to the International Energy Agency. This year, investment in coal is expected to rise by another 10 percent, to $150 billion — despite G20 statements and a scientific consensus that coal use must end immediately.

但峰会后的宣言没有提到国内的煤炭投资。根据国际能源机构的数据，2022年，全球燃煤发电量创下新高。今年，对煤炭的投资预计将再增加10%，达到1500亿美元——尽管G20发表了宣言，而且科学界一直认为，必须立即停止使用煤炭。

What has the G20 accomplished?

G20取得了哪些成就？

The G20 began with a meeting of finance ministers after the wave of steep currency devaluations in the late 1990s, and added an annual meeting of world leaders after the global financial crisis a decade later.

G20始于上世纪90年代末货币大幅贬值后的一次财长会议，并在10年后的全球金融危机后，增加了世界领导人的年度会议。

Senior officials (mostly Germans, Canadians and Americans) pushed for what they saw as a more flexible, inclusive forum than the Western-led Group of 7 nations, or G7. They believed that convening both established and rising powers would better protect the global economy, and early evidence suggested that they were right.

来自一些国家的高级官员（主要是德国人、加拿大人和美国人）呼吁建立一个在他们看来比西方领导的七国集团(G7)更具灵活性、包容性的论坛。他们认为，召集老牌大国和新兴大国可以更好地保护全球经济，而早期的证据证实了他们的判断。

Many experts praised the group for stabilizing the financial system in 2008 and 2009 by agreeing to spending measures worth $4 trillion and instituting bank reforms to rebuild trust.

许多专家称赞该集团在2008年和2009年稳住了金融体系，当时成员国同意了4万亿美元的支出措施，并对银行进行改革以重建信任。

The 2016 summit in China also showed the power of bringing leaders together when President Barack Obama and the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, announced that their countries would sign on to the Paris Agreement on climate.

2016年在中国举行的峰会同样显示了将各国领导人聚集在一起的力量，时任美国总统奥巴马和中国领导人习近平宣布，两国将签署关于气候问题的《巴黎协定》。

More recently, in 2021, the G20 supported a major tax overhaul that included a global minimum tax of at least 15 percent for each country. It also backed new rules that would require large global businesses like Amazon to pay taxes in countries where their products are sold, even if they lack offices there.

再往近些年看，2021年的时候，G20对一项重大税改提出支持，其中包括全球最低企业税率15%。它还支持制定新规，要求亚马逊这样的大型全球企业在其产品销售的国家纳税，即使这些企业在当地没有办事处。

The plan promised to add billions in government revenue and make tax havens less of a driving force for corporations. But, as with a lot of G20 statements, follow-through has been weak.

该计划承诺增加数十亿美元的政府收入，并降低避税港对企业的推动作用。但是，就像G20之前做出的许多声明一样，它也是后续乏力。

“The global tax agreement is an important step in the right direction,” the International Monetary Fund declared this year, “but it is not yet operational.”

“全球税收协定是朝着正确方向迈出的重要一步，”国际货币基金组织今年宣称，“但它尚未付诸实施。”

Why has the G20 struggled to make an impact?

为什么G20的决定执行不力？

Some critics argue that the G20 was flawed from the start, with a membership roster based on the whims of Western finance officials and central bankers.

一些批评人士认为，G20从一开始就有缺陷，成员名单完全是西方财政官员和央行官员拍脑门想出来的。

According to Robert Wade, a political economy professor at the London School of Economics, German and American officials “went down the list of countries saying, Canada in, Portugal out, South Africa in, Nigeria and Egypt out, and so on.”

按照伦敦政经学院的政治经济学教授罗伯特·韦德的说法，德国和美国官员“拿着国家名单一个个往下看，说，加拿大可以，葡萄牙不行，南非可以，尼日利亚和埃及不行，以此类推”。

For example, Argentina is neither an emerging economy nor among the 20 largest. It is a G20 member, many argue, because one of its former economy ministers, Domingo Cavallo, was a Harvard roommate of Larry Summers, the U.S. Treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001.

例如，阿根廷既不是新兴经济体，也不在20个最大经济体之列。许多人认为，阿根廷之所以成为G20成员，是因为阿根廷前经济部长多明戈·卡瓦略是1999年至2001年的美国财长拉里·萨默斯念哈佛时的室友。

In an email, Professor Wade said the organization still suffered from a “lack of representational procedures,” without a well-defined process for inclusion.

韦德在电子邮件中表示，该组织仍然存在“缺乏代表性程序”的问题，没有一个明确的加入程序。

“A given state is in or out, permanently,” he said.

“一个国家，在里面就永远在里面，在外面就永远在外面，”他说。

The group’s summits have also become a forum for the forces pulling against the established post-World War II order. When the G20 started, there was more consensus about how to hold the world together. Free trade was ascendant; great power rivalry seemed but a memory; and optimists worldwide hoped that the G20 would lead to a broader power base for aging institutions like the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund.

G20峰会也成为反对“二战”后既定秩序的各方力量的论坛。G20成立之初，人们就如何将世界团结在一起达成了更多共识。当时，自由贸易方兴未艾；大国竞争似乎只是一种记忆；世界各地的乐观主义者希望G20能为联合国和国际货币基金组织等老化的机构带来更广泛的权力基础。

Those hopes are still there, and blossoming elsewhere (the recent BRICS summit in South Africa is the latest example). But conflicts have supplanted G20 team efforts. The United States and China have become bitter competitors. Nationalism has surged as networked economies have come to look far riskier after the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, which has pushed up food and energy prices for countries far from the front lines.

这些希望仍然存在，并在其他地方开花结果（最近在南非举行的金砖国家峰会就是最新的例子）。但冲突已经取代了G20的团队努力。美中成为了激烈的竞争对手。在新冠疫情和乌克兰战争推高了远离前线的诸国的食品和能源价格之后，网络经济看起来风险要大得多，而民族主义情绪也随之高涨。

“There’s a lot more dissatisfaction with hyper-globalization, open trade and free capital,” said Stewart Patrick, director of the Global Order and Institutions Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In a situation where the global economy is fracturing and countries are pursuing their own thing, the question is, what do you do when you still have rules and institutions that were created for a very different environment?”

“人们对超全球化、开放贸易和自由资本的不满情绪比以前大很多，”卡内基国际和平研究院的全球秩序与制度项目主任斯图尔特·帕特里克说道。“在全球经济分崩离析、各国各自为政的情况下，问题在于，当你拥有的是一个为截然不同的环境制定的规则和制度时，你该怎么办？”

Does the world need the G20?

世界需要G20吗？

Few critics want to see the G20 eliminated. They worry that it is already weakening, with Mr. Xi skipping this year’s meeting. (President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will also be a no-show.)

几乎没有批评者希望看到G20被排除在外。他们担心，随着习近平不出席今年的峰会，该组织已经遭到了削弱（俄罗斯总统普京也将缺席）。

Many foreign policy experts argue that the G20’s failures simply point to the need for modernization in international institutions.

许多外交政策专家认为，G20的失败只是表明了国际机构现代化的必要性。

As Dani Rodrik and Stephen M. Walt wrote last year in Foreign Affairs: “It is increasingly clear that the existing, Western-oriented approach is no longer adequate to address the many forces governing international power relations.” They predicted a future with less agreement, in which “Western policy preferences will prevail less” and “each country will have to be granted greater leeway in managing its economy, society and political system.”

正如丹尼·罗德里克和斯蒂芬·沃尔特去年在《外交事务》杂志上所写的那样：“越来越明显的是，以西方为导向的现有手段已不足以应对主导国际权力关系的诸多力量。”他们预测，未来更难以达成共识，“西方的政策偏好将不再占据上风”，而且“每个国家在管理经济、社会和政治制度方面获得更大的回旋余地”。

Professor Wade has called for a reformulated G20, with a core of economic powerhouses complemented by a rotating set of smaller nations. Mr. Patrick said the G20 could play a leading role in the “post-neoliberal” order by discussing how to separate the benefits of trade from the risks of overindulging the free-market system that the organization was built to protect.

韦德呼吁重新规划G20，以经济强国为核心，以一系列较小国家轮流补充。帕特里克说，G20可以通过讨论如何将贸易的好处与过度纵容自由市场体系的风险分开，在“后新自由主义”秩序中发挥主导作用，该组织建立的初衷正是保护自由市场体系。

“The G20 would be a natural place to begin hammering out what rules of peaceful coexistence permit countries to share in a more tempered globalization,” he said. “That would be a positive agenda.”

“由G20开始制定和平共处的规则再合适不过，使各国能够分享一个更加温和的全球化，”他说。“这将是一个积极正面的议程。”