Pakistan takes over G-24 chair, Aurangzeb sets three priorities

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan has taken over the chairmanship of G-24, the 24-member intergovernmental group of developing countries that coordinates members' positions on monetary and development finance issues, the finance ministry said.

The ministry announced the handover in a post on X. Express News reported that Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb called the chairmanship an important responsibility and set out three priorities for Pakistan's term. UrduPoint carried the same announcement, reporting that the minister reaffirmed the commitment to strengthening the collective voice of developing economies.

Aurangzeb said the first priority is to place development at the centre of global economic policymaking, treating macroeconomic stability as the foundation for investment, productivity, employment and shared prosperity so that developing and low-income economies can move out of crisis and towards sustained growth.

The second priority, he said, is to strengthen the multilateral framework so that it serves members collectively through institutions that are more inclusive and representative. Pakistan will press for more equitable governance, meaningful participation in decision-making, and a Bretton Woods system, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that responds to the changing needs of its members, the minister said.

The third is a development-oriented international financial architecture: development finance delivered on priority and on time, sustainable solutions to debt, a stronger global financial safety net, climate resilience and fuller mobilisation of public and private capital.

Aurangzeb said the future of developing economies is not detached from the future of the global economy but central to it, and pointed to investment, innovation, industrialisation and global growth as areas where emerging and developing countries hold unused capacity. The task, he said, is to make sure that capacity is not held back by an international financial architecture that has not fully adapted to a changing world.

He cited Pakistan's own record of stabilisation, reform and resilience, and said financial stability has to be aligned with long-term development goals. Economies that are midway through reform programmes need the fiscal resources and the policy room to reach sustained growth, he said.

Pakistan's chairmanship will follow G-24's long-standing principles of consultation, consensus and collective advocacy, the minister said, with close work alongside member countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and with the IMF, the World Bank and other international partners.

He thanked Nigeria, the outgoing chair, for its leadership. The value of collective leadership, he said, will be measured not by the volume of the group's voice but by the change that voice produces, describing its mission as moving from collective voice to collective influence, and from collective influence to meaningful progress.