The world's major nations have put together a new surveillance process that they hope will halt the types of destabilizing economic imbalances that contributed to the worst global downturn since World War II.
Finance officials in the United States and other members of the Group of 20 major economies said the new monitoring program will closely follow key measurements of economic health such as government budget and trade deficits, personal savings levels and investment flows between nations.
The hope is that the monitoring process will highlight problems before they become so big that they pose a threat to global growth. But the deal announced Friday by the G-20 left many questions unanswered about just how effective the new procedures will be.
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