Finance officials from the world's largest economies on Monday called on countries to reject protectionism and currency manipulation despite a raft of economic problems that include the U.S. deficit.
Meeting in Mexico City one day before the U.S. elections, the G-20 finance ministers issued a statement saying the United States faces "a potential sharp fiscal tightening."
"The United States will carefully calibrate the pace of fiscal tightening to ensure that public finances are placed on a sustainable long-run path, while avoiding a sharp fiscal contraction in 2013," the G-20 said in a statement.
Other delegates at the meeting expressed similar concerns.
"Whoever is going to be elected or re-elected tomorrow (in the United States) will be faced with that challenge, and will have to tackle that issue upfront, very shortly," said International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde.
Agustin Carstens, the governor of Mexico's central bank, said the G-20 countries told the United States how important the issue was for continuing the world economic recovery.
While much of the attention at the two-day meeting focused on Europe's continuing financial crisis, E.U. officials were focusing the heat on the U.S. and other problems.
Despite the challenges, the G-20 statement said: "We are firmly committed to open trade and investment, expanding markets and resisting protectionism in all its forms."
In apparent reference to concerns that China or other countries might seek to combat a downturn in growth by manipulating currencies, the G-20 officials wrote, "we reiterate our commitments to move more rapidly toward more market-determined exchange rate systems and exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying fundamentals, avoid persistent exchange rate misalignments and refrain from competitive devaluation of currencies."
Earlier Monday, Germany and the United Kingdom proposed that the world's biggest economies form a common front against tax evasion related to internet commerce and other revenue-shifting schemes, and said they received strong support at the meeting of officials from the G-20 nations.
Osborne and German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schauble said they don't want to scare businesses away, but said companies must pay what they owe.
They said a united approach among the world's largest economy is the best way to fight evasion, without penalizing any single country.
They did not mention which specific accounting procedures might be targeted or what enforcement measures were proposed, but one minister said the goal was "acting together as the world's largest economies to make sure that international tax standards keep pace with international business."
They said the proposal had been forwarded to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for study, and that team would report back to the Group of 20 finance ministers' next meeting, to be held in Moscow in February. Both ministers said they also support the OECD's own "tax-base erosion and profit-shifting" initiative, focused on the same problem.
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