London - A multi-pronged package agreed by G20 leaders will not solve the global economic crisis but it marks the crucial first step on the road to recovery, British newspapers said Friday.
"Some useful progress, but still a way to go," said an editorial in the Financial Times business daily, echoing the view in most newspapers here that the meeting of world leaders was broadly a success.
Participants in the Group of 20 summit overcame their differences Thursday to pledge a huge raft of new spending and a crackdown on tax havens and excess corporate pay as they sought to fight off economic disaster.
The FT said the plan included some "real achievements", in particular the promise of increased resources - about one trillion dollars - for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which the paper described as "extremely cheering".
But it said that summit host Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, had sounded "disappointingly thin" on the key area of cleaning up banks' toxic assets. The absence of detail here was "extremely disconcerting", it said.
"The world is better for having held this summit. The possibility of dangerous contagion is lower and useful progress has been made across a range of issues," it said.
"But leaders must remember that the crisis, which started in the banking system, will not be resolved until the banking system itself is fixed. That is where they must turn their attention now."
The left-wing Guardian agreed, saying: "The short-term future of the world economy is blighted by two common problems: a nasty global recession and an unprecedented banking crisis.
"The message from the G20 was that countries have to tackle both problems on their own."
But it conceded that getting world leaders to agree anything was an achievement, a position shared by other commentators.
"The G20 in London produced no grand plan for recovery," said an editorial in the right-wing Daily Telegraph.
"But if the jamboree has a legacy, it may be that the optimistic tenor of the leaders' exchanges goes some way to restoring battered global confidence."
The Times said "confidence is the crucial missing ingredient" in the economic crisis and the mere fact of a G20 deal could help in restoring this.
The paper welcomed the commitment to the IMF as "substantial", and while saying the G20 leaders had "skirted the main problem" by failing to properly tackle the banking crisis, suggested this was always going to be the case.
The Daily Mirror tabloid, meanwhile, was impressed at the sheer sums involved, suggesting the one trillion dollars agreed for the IMF and other finance and trade institutions was enough to buy everyone on Earth an iPod. - Sapa-AFP