The Australian Prime Minister, the German Chancellor and the US Vice-President are among leaders of the world’s richest economies who have expressed optimism this weekend over the outcome of Thursday’s London Summit of the G20 countries.

Speaking on Sunday on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC-TV, Australia’s Kevin Rudd said only the G20 had the global economic reach to tackle the economic recession and restore jobs around the world. He said there would be 'real, measureable progress' in each of the areas on the agenda, which would demonstrate global cooperation and coordination on a scale unprecedented in modern times.

The Australian Prime Minister said the fiscal stimulus agreed at the Washington Summit had amounted to 2 per cent of global GDP, supporting 20m more jobs than would have been the case in its absence. The G20 Finance Ministers meeting two weeks ago had agreed to ask the IMF to monitor the impact of this global stimulus and determine what might be needed in 2010 – he expected there would be a further summit later in the year to consider its findings.

'There is a great, disproportionate emphasis on disagreements around the margins,' he added, 'when, in fact, much has been concretely achieved with a mechanism for the future.'

US Vice-President Joe Biden, speaking at the Progressive Governance Conference in Chile attended by Gordon Brown, said the London Summit would produce tangible results. 'The one thing that we've concluded in the States is that the status quo is not an option.... Things are going to change whether we like it or not.'

In an interview in Saturday’s Financial Times German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she expected 'good results in all areas' at the London Summit.  'We are coming together to make joint decisions, not to compete against each other. We all want the same thing: to put the world economy back on its feet as fast as possible and to prevent such a crisis from happening again.'

 

'I think we can achieve good results in all areas and I was very glad to hear the US president make it clear that he did not want just the one or the other, but both,' said Ms Merkel, who had just talked to Barack Obama via video-conference before the interview.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband was also interviewed on the Andrew Marr Show, where he said the London Summit would represent a step forward in global economic governance, with 'issues of politics at the international level being applied to the economy really for the first time in 50 or 60 years.'

He added: 'This is about trying to tackle an exceptional economic crisis, far beyond the financial system, and set in place measures, that really do make a difference over the short-term and the medium-term'.

On the same programme, Fu Ying, China's ambassador to London, said the London Summit was a very important meeting. 'Leaders might not be able fix all problems in one day but it will be an important process in the global effort to tackle the global crisis.'

Alistair Darling, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, said later that he expected a communiqué to emerge from Thursday's summit with concrete measures to get the global economy moving again in a sustainable way. 'We will get agreement this week on a number of issues, but it will be necessary to do more – for example, to restore bank lending.'

Writing in The Observer, a British Sunday newspaper, the leading economics commentator Will Hutton said pessimism about the outcome of the London Summit was misplaced. The G20 meeting was likely to reach agreement on issues of financial regulation that 'would have been unthinkable even three months ago', as well as a common approach to tackling 'the alarming depth of the global recession'.

He added that the 'fashionable view' was that the G20 meeting would be 'a huge disappointment, full of banalities and merely papering over the deep cracks between Europe and the US.' The reality, he concluded was that 'this would be the first international summit to make substantive progress regulating global finance since 1944.'