A G20 chair's statement to conclude the meeting said the participants, except China's, agreed that countries should eliminate "non-market policies" that exacerbate imbalances.
"In particular, countries with excessive and persistent external surpluses should remove distortions that constrain domestic consumption and that result in an over-reliance on exports for growth," the statement said.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Bessent said that getting 19 countries to agree to take on the problem was "incredible" and shows "the sheer the enormity of the problem".
Bessent spoke on Tuesday after a two-day meeting of the 20 countries in Asheville, North Carolina.
Bessent urged his G20 counterparts to take a page from the Trump administration's playbook of using tariffs and other measures to crack down on trade imbalances.
He told reporters he warned other nations at the beginning of President Donald Trump 's second term that the new US "tariff wall" would mean that Chinese goods would flood their markets.
"And unfortunately, I was right," Bessent told reporters.
"The rest of the world probably needs to take a hard look at what they should be doing to protect their citizens' jobs, their manufacturing base, so that everything they do doesn't get offshored."
"We believe that non-market-based economies pushing out a never-ending stream of cheap exports is not sustainable," he said.
The Trump administration's tariff policies have been criticised by economists and politicians for raising costs for US consumers and, in many cases, for punishing allies.
The Tax Foundation, an independent think tank, found that the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration throughout 2025 raised the overall retail price of imported consumer goods by roughly seven per cent relative to pre-tariff trends.
The US Supreme Court in February decided that the sweeping global tariffs that Trump imposed under an emergency powers law during his second term in office were unconstitutional.
The Trump administration has been overhauling its approach, and is eyeing an additional 7.5 per cent tariff on Chinese imports after investigating alleged Chinese excess industrial capacity and forced-labour regulations.
Bessent met with his counterparts from China at the summit, though he did not provide details of how those talks went.
"We have more in common with the Chinese on Iran than we disagree on," Bessent said.
"The Chinese agree Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. The Chinese agree that there should be freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz."
Bessent has said China's trade surplus, which reached a record-high $US1.2 trillion ($A1.7 trillion) in 2025, is a barrier to global economic growth - as well as what he calls excessive regulation.
Global debt has reached a record high of $US353 trillion ($A493 trillion), with the US debt reaching a record $US40 trillion($A56 trillion) in August.
Meanwhile, the presence of Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov, agitated attendees of the conference hosted by the US Siluanov met with Bessent on Monday on the sidelines of the meeting, but was not included in the traditional "family photo" of ministers.
Canadian Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne said Russia's attendance at the G20 finance meeting "created a lot of discomfort around the table, not only from Canada, but from colleagues around the table".
with reuters
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