BEIJING (Reuters) - The world must get better at managing capital flows and imbalances, but this is not a challenge that will be resolved overnight, British finance minister George Osborne told Reuters on yesterday.

"There's the debate about global imbalances and about the relationship between deficit and surplus economies. That is a huge economic challenge," Osborne said in an interview in Beijing ahead of this week's G20 summit in South Korea.

"Anyone who thinks that can simply be solved by a sentence in a communique, I think simply doesn't understand that this has always been a challenge in managing the global economy," he added.

"We have to get better as a world at managing capital flows and managing imbalances," Osborne said. "There's a growing understanding that the root cause of our problems are these imbalances and we need to address them."

Capital inflows into developing countries have been increasingly strong. Flows into emerging market funds reached $46.4 billion in the year to the fourth week of October compared with $9.4 billion for all of 2009, according to Global fund tracker EPFR.