Facts About The G20
Posted June 20, 2010 3:29 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Facts about the Group of 20 (G20):
What is it?: A group that brings together advanced economies and emerging markets with the goal of promoting global economic stability.
Members: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, European Union and European Commission. (Representatives of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Financial Stability Board and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development are also included. Other strategic countries are often invited to sit as observers.)
Summits: Canada is hosting this year’s summit June 26-27 in Toronto — the first summit of the G20 as a permanent body. Leaders met for the first time in November 2008 in Washington as the global financial crisis spiralled out of control. They met again in London in April 2009 and in Pittsburgh last September.
Agreements: At their first meeting in Washington, leaders agreed to a massive global stimulus package. At their next summit in London, they put the package in place. In Pittsburgh, they agreed to forge a longer-term framework that would find a better balance between Eastern surpluses and Western debts. They also agreed to look for tougher banking regulations.
Change: At the Pittsburgh summit, leaders agreed to make the G20 a permanent body to replace the G7 as the world’s primary decision-making body for global economics.
History: Inspired mainly by then-finance minister Paul Martin of Canada, G20 finance ministers began meeting in 1999 in the wake of the Asian financial crisis. The idea was to gather decision-makers from every economy big enough to put the global economy at risk, to prevent the kind of contagion that engulfed currencies around the world in 1997 and 1998. Leaders resisted the idea of a G20 leaders summit until the financial crisis of 2008.
Scope: G20 summits at first focused solely on crisis resolution. More recently, they have also negotiated climate-change financing and subsidies, global trade, jobs and some international development issues. Canada is trying to define the G20 narrowly, to focus purely on economics, while leaving other issues for the G8. But emerging markets not included in the G8 want to expand the scope of the G20.
What’s next?:South Korea hosts the next summit in November, followed by France next year.
