Leaders see G20 as key stop on road to recovery

NEW YORK (Reuters) - This week's meeting of the Group of 20 (G20) nations offers a timely opportunity for nations to forge a lasting agreement on how to address global problems as the world economy moves toward recovery, leaders said on Tuesday.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said it was easier to reach consensus when people are scared, as they were at earlier G20 meetings, but that the key is to keep the dialogue going.

"We need to have this consensus working again for the exit strategy, for how we get out of all what has been created during the crisis," Strauss-Kahn said at the Clinton Global Initiative, a philanthropic summit organized by former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

The G20 club of rich and developing economies holds a two-day leaders summit in Pittsburgh from Thursday and the United States wants to see rebalancing the world economy high on the agenda.

Strauss-Kahn reiterated the IMF's forecast for the world economy to return to growth in the first half of 2010. He went a step further to say that a double-dip recession was unlikely.

"It's a possibility, but I don't think the probability is so high. So my preferred scenario is that we will slowly go back to growth as expected, with global growth becoming positive in the first half of 2010," he said.

Argentine President Cristina Fernandez said she was looking for the meeting to address the growth prospects for countries that have been hit by the global economic slowdown.

"With my own country for the last six years we had growth at Chinese rates, 8.4 percent per year," Fernandez said. "This year we will have growth ... but of course not at the rate we had before the crisis."

"The countries of Latin America, emerging economies generally within the G20, convey this need to find a way to repair the damage."

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