Commonwealth countries must take action on economic stability, investment, trade and aid if they are to weather the current global economic storms, the chancellor has said.

Addressing Commonwealth finance ministers on Wednesday, Gordon Brown conceded that the international community was facing a "worldwide slowdown".

He warned that governments would have to make their economic management more transparent to deal with the "vulnerabilities of a more integrated but more volatile international financial system".

"We must all be vigilant to the risks that we face at this time and stand ready to act decisively with economic reform as we did with monetary activism a year ago," he said.

"We must all, each continent and the international institutions, face up to our responsibilities in sustaining and strengthening the economic recovery round the world: Europe must make progress on economic reform, Japan take decisive action on financial sector reform, and America show that corporate reform is working," he said.

He called for governments to develop clear procedures to deal with fiscal and monetary issues and urged minister to support corporate and social standards.

"The adoption of clear and transparent procedures in economic decisions - for example, presenting a full factual picture of the country's debt position and the health of the financial sectors - and a willingness to be monitored for them, improves stability and provides to markets a flow of specific country-by-country information that engenders greater investor confidence and reduces the problem of contagion," he said.

"We should all adopt and monitor similar codes and standards for corporate governance including for accounting, working with standard setters to develop stronger regulatory frameworks."

He also called for the International Monetary Fund to be given new powers to investigate countries which fail to implement the safeguards.

"I believe there is a strong case for enhancing the IMF's surveillance and monitoring functions so that surveillance is - and is seen to be - independent of decisions about crisis resolution," he said.

Such a system would root out problems before they posed a risk to global economic stability, the chancellor said.

"Under this new framework we can move from letting crises happen and then intervening to systems that in themselves diminish the likelihood of crises - and ensure earlier awareness as difficulties arise and more measured, orderly responses when crises have to be resolved," he said.

"So the new financial architecture, I suggest, is not just the adoption of codes and standards by all countries but a far more effective system for preventing and resolving crises, not least to ensure that the burden of adjustments is not as in the past placed on the poorest and most vulnerable."