STRASBOURG, October 1 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova – Economies across the globe are facing slow growth, high unemployment and growing inequalities, problems that have aggravated significantly over the past month, Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Angel Gurria said Wednesday.
"We just put [out] our interim economic assessment – it is not a pretty view," Gurria said at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) sitting on the 2013-2014 OECD activities.
"We are looking at slow growth, we have high unemployment," Gurria added.
The OECD head noted that in the interim economic assessment published in September, the organization downgraded every large economy in the world "with the exception of India, which is a little better, [and] China, which is more or less holding steady."
"But practically in every single large economy of the world we are looking at a downgrade of growth," Gurria said.
"We have growing inequalities; inequalities have never been as high as they are today. And we have a very serious destruction of trust, of confidence in the institutions that we have built over the last 100 years. I'm talking here about parliaments, political parties, prime ministers, presidents, ministers, international organizations, banking systems, multinationals," Gurria stressed.
"We think we can do better. We should take a hard look at the way we address issues," Gurria added.
According to the OECD head, there are a number of contradictory issues that need to be resolved in order to improve economic growth.
"We have to take into account the social aspects," Gurria said. "We have to reduce deficits, we have [to] be careful that we do not kill growth, that we take care of the more vulnerable, the victims of the crisis – the young, the women, the children etc. etc., and we have to be careful that we can still promote investment. [There are] a lot of thing[s] that are sometimes contradictory, and this is of course why we are in such a difficult situation."
PACE is holding its fall session in Strasbourg from September 29 to October 3, 2014.
The Russian delegation has skipped the PACE session because of a split with the West, after the assembly agreed in April to curb Russia's voting rights following the conflict in Ukraine and Crimea's reunification with Russia.
In spring, Moscow officially informed PACE of its decision to halt bilateral cooperation and bowed out of the summer session.
