G20

10 Key excerpts on "G20"

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  Comparing Emerging and Advanced Markets

  • Marcus Goncalves, Harry Xia(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Business Expert Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 The Influence of the G-7 Advanced Economies and G-20 Group Overview

  When we think of the G-20 countries, whose summit took place in St. Petersburg, Russia, on September 5th through the 6th, 2013, we should think about the group of 20 finance ministers and central bankers from the 20 major economies around the world. In essence, the G-20 is comprised of 19 countries plus the European Union (EU), represented by the president of the European Council and by the European Central Bank (ECB). We begin this book discussing the importance and influence of the G-20, not only does this group comprise some of the most advancing economies in the world, collectively these 20 economies account for approximately 80 percent of the gross world product (GWP); 80 percent of the world’s trade, which includes EUs intra-trade; and about two-thirds of the world’s population.* These proportions are not expected to change radically for many decades to come.

  The G-20, proposed by the former Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin,1 acts as a forum for cooperation and consultation on matters pertaining to the international financial system. Since its inception in September of 1999, the group has been studying, reviewing, and promoting high-level discussions of policy issues concerning the promotion of international financial stability. The group has replaced the G-8 group as the main economic council of wealthy nations.2 Although not popular with many political activists and intellectuals, the group exercises major influence on economic and financial policies around the world.

  The G-20 Summit was created as a response both to the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010 and to a growing recognition that key emerging countries (and markets) were not adequately included in the core of global economic discussion and governance. The G-20 country members are listed in Figure 1.1

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  Moving Forward On the Path of Global Studies

  The Selected Academic Works of Bin Xia

  • Bin Xia(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Page Publishing, Inc.

    (Publisher)

  102

  Considered as the most severe economic downturn since the 1929 Great Depression, the 2008 Economic Crisis, which was unprecedented in terms of scope, character, the speed of spread, and the danger of it posed, underscored the importance of international coordination and cooperation to find appropriate solutions to the crisis and its effects. A slowing down of economic growth in developing nations pushed millions of people back into poverty, with adverse effects on health, nutrition, and education levels. As the economic crisis spread in 2008, the G-20 strengthened international cooperation to achieve common prosperity through hosting a summit including heads of states and heads of governments from all G-20 members. The discussion of the first G-20 summit held in Washington D.C. narrowly focused on the related issues of global economic crisis. The Prime Minister of India, Mr. Manmohan Singh, pointed out that the World Bank and other major international economic institutions have sufficient resources to continue playing their role in overcoming the crisis. More specifically, the World Bank would provide more international investments for developing nations in infrastructure construction and improving people’s livelihoods.103 In a declaration delivered by the 2008 G-20 Summit, leaders agreed to “help emerging and developing economies gain access to finance in current difficult financial conditions, including through liquidity facilities and program support… Encourage the World Bank and other multilateral development banks to use their full capacity in support of their development agenda, and welcome the recent introduction of new facilities by the World Bank in the areas of infrastructure and trade finance.”104

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  Reforming Global Economic Governance

  An Unsettled Order

  • Carlo Monticelli(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 For better or for worse, this debate has never gained traction in the international official community. Policy makers have been afraid to initiate contentious negotiations about format and composition, which would have interfered with more pressing matters. One should not underestimate the conservative attitude of incoming and prospective G20 presidencies, which are keen to get the attention guaranteed by hosting the summit and do not want to have a different forum reduce their visibility.

  Despite the questions raised about its legitimacy and its mixed success, since the upgrade to the leaders’ level, the G20 has unfailingly proven to be the laboratory where the key changes in global economic and financial governance have taken place, have been decided or initiated, formally or informally. Indeed, since 2009, when the major decisions that averted the collapse of the global economy were made in London and Pittsburgh, the G20 has really been the only “G” in town. Even though it has regained some importance in the most recent years, the G7 could no longer rival the G20 for scope of decision or capacity to steer the debate among all the relevant global players. At the same time, the undeniable flaws of the G20 in providing adequate responses to the demand for international policy coordination – a demand arising from ever-increasing interconnectedness – raise legitimate doubts about its longevity as the hub of global governance.

  The crowning of the G20 as the world-saver

  With the success of the Washington meeting, the G20 had proven itself to possess the potential to become the hub for the international coordination of policy responses to the crisis. It could not possibly have become the key forum of international economic cooperation without the important decisions made at the London and Pittsburgh summits in 2009.

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  The G20

  A New Geopolitical Order

  • K. Postel-Vinay(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Pivot

    (Publisher)

  The L20 concept was debated within the community of international relations experts and analysts. Political scientist John Kirton, founder of the research group on the G8 at the University of Toronto, identified three opinion trends in the debate over the L20. 16 First the L20 “rejectionists” were against expanding the G20’s economic agenda into the political sphere. Second, the “reinforcers” were in favor of strengthening the group into an L20 that would coexist along with established international institutions. Third were advocates of replacing the G8 by the L20, the “replacers.” The second approach, championed by the reinforcers, finally won out, as the G20 became a leadership summit and to date it has replaced none of the existing institutions, not even the G8, despite countless predictions that it was about to disappear or the many expressions of hope that it would. The only difference between what the reinforcers recommended and what actually happened is that the G20 changed its status but not its name. Keeping the same appellation enabled it to maintain an impression of continuity and thereby diminish the risk—albeit inevitable—of reviving the controversy about the group’s composition. The proliferation of Gs and other state groupings since 1945 What place does the G20 occupy today in what Raymond Aron called the “diplomatic constellation,” 17 the multitude of fora in which international negotiations take place? What more precisely is its position within the various “Gs,” those informal groups of states also known as “clubs,” “committees” and “communities”? Why has the G20 prompted such unusual reactions of curiosity, distrust or optimism, and why at this time? The G7 and the G8 have been familiar to the general public for a few decades now. The G20 cropped up in the news more recently, together with the financial crisis catalyzed by the bursting of the American real estate bubble in 2008

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  The Group of Twenty (G20)

  • Andrew F. Cooper, Ramesh Thakur(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In surveying the architecture of global governance, the G20 offers the best crossover point between legitimacy (based on inclusiveness and representation), efficiency (which requires a compact executive decision-making body), and effectiveness (where those who make the decisions have the greatest ability to implement or thwart them). The G20 is so composed as to ensure the presence at the top table of the world’s steering committee of all countries the size and/or strategic importance of which—whether economic and/or geopolitical—gives them a particularly crucial role in the discussion of global problems, needs, and solutions. When they apply their combined geopolitical weight to press on particularly intractable problems, it becomes a case of will the immovable object give way to the irresistible force?

  The core animating purpose of the G20 should be to steer policy consensus and coordination, and mobilize the requisite political will to drive reform and address global challenges while navigating the shifting global currents of power, wealth, and influence. In turn, its impact will be greater if it can combine the personal engagement and informality developed by the G8 summitry, the detailed preparation and follow-up work required to vest summits with successful outcome and delivery, and the unique legitimacy that only the UN can confer as the sole authenticated voice of the collective international community. In other words, the real challenge is how to retain the positive attributes of the existing major nodes of global governance while shedding their pathologies. The answer is to configure and operate the G20 as the hub of a networked global governance.

  The last word, appropriately, belongs to Paul Martin: “the time for the G20 to draw the line in the sand is now. What the [leaders] should remember is that they are not there to speak only for themselves, but also for the 173 countries that are not at the G20 table.”21

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  G20 Governance for a Globalized World

  • John J. Kirton(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The leaders of the world’s key governments quickly decided that among all the international institutions available or imaginable, the G20 was the most appropriate to lead the global response to the 2007–10 financial crisis. This suggests that they judged the earlier G20 finance ministers’ and central bank governors’ forum to have been successful during its first decade, and saw the G20 being so yet again at a higher level. The G20 seems, in retrospect, to have been the obvious international institution to mobilize a new configuration of collectively predominant economic powers to meet the needs of a rapidly globalizing, more equally vulnerable world. At the same time, the much greater speed, scope, scale, simultaneity, and societal impact of the 2007–10 crisis, relative to the 1997–99 one, as well as the former’s outbreak after only a decade of G20 efforts to produce financial stability at the level of ministers and bank governors, suggest that there were serious shortcomings in the G20’s earlier performance. Such shortcomings could be sufficiently large that a simple rise of the same club to the leaders’ level might be insufficient to overcome them.

  Which of these two possibilities proved most accurate is a matter of critical significance for the many whose financial security, economic prospects, and daily lives have been devastated by the events of 2007–10 and their aftermath. It is equally important for scholars and practitioners of international politics and global governance seeking, respectively, to understand and to shape the G20 and other informal plurilateral summit institutions by specifying the workings of an effective, legitimate, and enduring global governance architecture for a now tightly wired world where major power shifts and changes in the connectivity of countries are underway.

  To date, judgements about the course, causes, and consequences of G20 governance at the level of finance ministers and bank governors and now leaders have offered few convincing conclusions that command consensus by the standards used by scholars and others. In their place has come a wide-ranging, often poorly disciplined, prescriptively and normatively oriented debate among several schools of thought (see Appendix A ). This debate often focuses in the first instance on the general question of the relationship between the new G20 and the old G7/8 (Hermawan et al. 2011

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  The Redesign of the Global Financial Architecture

  • Stuart P. M. Mackintosh(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  President Bush and Hank Paulson worried that a summit meeting could degenerate into a platform for grandstanding. Bush suspected that the participants would attack the existing global economic and financial system, which he did not see as broken. And Bush and Paulson struggled over the issue of who would attend and what the goals would be. They decided to avoid that problem by elevating the G20 finance ministers’ forum into a leaders’ summit, because they knew the grouping and believed a conversion was the simplest route. This was a pragmatic solution. Finance ministry officials in the forum could rapidly act as ‘sherpas’ for the new G20, smoothing planning and coordination. In addition, there would be fewer complaints from emerging countries that their inclusion was an afterthought, as might happen with the Sarkozy proposal. Bush was joined by Brown, who agreed that using the G20 format involved the least complexity and avoided the need to create an entirely new body and the diplomatic difficulties that would ensue. In the end, Merkel also came on board and backed the Brown-Bush jump to the G20. The hastily convened summit brought round the table almost all the major global economic powers including the leadership of key emerging economies (CSIS, 2009: 21). The G20’s creation sent the message that the prior institutionalized format (G7 or G8, in particular) was inadequate to the task (Cooper, 2010). It was a recognition that the US as a weakened hegemonic power and its allies could no longer drive the process alone or just with its allies (Beeson and Bell, 2009).

  Emerging-country leaders supported calling a G20 leaders’ summit. They were eager to become full members of a new forum, rather than ad hoc additions to an existing smaller grouping. The rhetoric was sweeping. Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantegna stated that they were, ‘creating a new international economic order … a new international economic architecture that has the G20 at the top of the pyramid, providing guidance and support to international financial institutions’ (IMF, 2009: 2). With hindsight, Minister Mantega would be proved largely correct.

  The G20 proposal to include emerging economy leaders from Brazil, China, India and Russia, as well as other influential players such as Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey, was a reflection of the severity and global nature of the crisis and of the need to bring the leaders of both creditor and surplus states to the table as equals. This time, the creditors were emerging economy players and the debtors were in the G7, a role reversal from prior financial and banking crises that historically erupted more frequently in emerging economies (Rogoff and Reinhart, 2009: 160). Expressed most simply, it signalled that ‘we ought to have new institutions that reflect the world we live in’ (Traub, 2009: 4). It was a rebalancing to reflect new geopolitical and global macroeconomic realities.

  Boosting the role of key emerging economies had been a long-standing US Treasury goal, and the crisis afforded an opportunity to hasten that change. To the watching world of nervous voters and panicking investors, a summit of the G20 would also show that it was ‘no longer business as usual’ (Financial Times, 2008) and could help rebuild economic, market and investor confidence. But the change would still leave the core members calling the policy shots. In the heat of the crisis, this did not matter, for all were confronted with the same reality and this pushed leaders together, focussed minds, removed extraneous issues and pernicious influences and forced participants towards action. Only later did legitimacy concerns arise.

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  The Power of the G20

  The Politics of Legitimacy in Global Governance

  • Steven Slaughter(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The third background condition is that multilateral cooperation has been increasingly challenged in recent decades, leading governments to explore alternatives, such as informal IOs, voluntary agreements or the operation of transnational policy networks. Informal and voluntary forms of global governance like the G20 have fewer capacities to override the domestic policy settings of participating states (Pisani-Ferry 2018; Vabulas and Snidal 2013). Clearly, national interests, sovereignty and multilateralism still largely define the contours of global governance, but in many respects, multilateralism was so successful in enabling interdependence and globalisation with respect to a growing number of states that this system has become overloaded and gridlocked (Cooper and Thakur 2013: 1–9; Hale and Held 2012). It is also the case that many areas of global governance have significant domestic implications that complicate and frustrate international cooperation. The domestic difficulties in advancing free trade within the WTO and in advancing a binding multilateral response to climate change are often cited as key examples (Held et al. 2013: 3; Pisani-Ferry 2018). While the G20 is intended to avoid the problems of large-scale multilateralism, greater awareness of economic interdependence between the world’s major economies and concerns about the efficacy of existing forms of multilateralism have led to new networks of policy-makers to deliberate and coordinate policy. Consequently, these lower profile and voluntary forms of technical cooperation and coordination have been advanced as alternatives or supplements to grand multilateral agreements (See Pisani-Ferry 2018).

  Within this context, transnational policy networks of the G20 have been developed and become more elaborate and institutionalised because of the increasing profile of the G20 in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and its elevation to a forum of leaders. This has led to resulting questions about its legitimacy that relate to reasons both external and internal to the G20. One principle external reason for the development of more elaborate forms of policy networks is that the G20 has been taken seriously by states and agencies outside of its narrow membership. After the G20 was elevated to a leader’s forum in 2008, it attracted interest because of its rising profile and apparent success in galvanising international cooperation in response to the global financial crisis. Pre-existing policy networks working on topics like tax transparency attempted to engage with the G20 after its formation for this reason (Eccleston et al. 2015: 2). Despite the rising profile of the G20, there has been a range of questions raised about the legitimacy of the G20’s membership and activity. These concerns encompass both the international legitimacy of the G20 from the perspective of excluded states as well as public concerns about the power of the G20. This has led to external calls for the G20 to develop greater forms of transparency, inclusivity and accountability.

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  MIKTA, Middle Powers, and New Dynamics of Global Governance

  The G20's Evolving Agenda

  • J. Mo, J. Mo, Kenneth A. Loparo, J. Mo, Mo Jongryn(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Pivot

    (Publisher)

  5 Middle Power Cooperation and Related Issues in the G20 Choi Heenam

  Abstract:

  The major global financial crises of 1997 and 2008 demonstrated the need for multilateral economic cooperation and prompted the creation and growth of the G20 forum. Made up of leaders of advanced and emerging economies, the G20 promotes discussion and collaboration on how to mitigate the amplified effects of financial shocks on the increasingly interconnected and interdependent global economy. Within this multilateral body, the middle powers have the potential to play an important role in mediating the opinions of different economies and ensuring that global financial measures are comprehensively adopted by all. While numerous obstacles still inhibit the formal setup for middle power cooperation, there are several areas of financial regulatory reform that can bring middle powers together and lend them the opportunity to facilitate effective dialogue among the G20 members.

  Keywords: G20, IMF, RFA, FSB, hub-and-spoke approach

  Jongryn, Mo, ed., MIKTA, Middle Powers, and New Dynamics of Global Governance: The G20’s Evolving Agenda . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI : 10.1057/9781137506467.0008.

  G20: Global economic governance

  The growing interconnectedness of the global economy means each shock is going to have greater implications for the global economy, often leading to deeper and more severe crisis than the one before. For example, the integrated nature of the global financial market and highly developed financial derivatives amplified the global impact of the recent financial crisis.1

  At the same time, it is these global crises that have served as a catalyst for the birth and growth of the G20. The Asian financial crisis in 1997 led to the launching of the G20 finance ministers’ meeting in 1999. And when the US subprime mortgage crisis unfolded in 2008, it led to the convening of leaders through G20 summits. There was a consensus on the need for the G20 summit to reflect the opinions of both emerging and advanced economies. Consequently, the first G20 summit was held in November 2008 in Washington, DC, and the London summit followed in 2009. During the London meeting, the G20 countries committed to many meaningful actions and, we could say, saved the global economy from falling into a depression. Since then, the G20 has been working hard to find a stable pathway to a strong, sustainable, and balanced growth.

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  Challenges to Emerging and Established Powers

  • Marco Vieira, Jonathan Grix(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This implies much depends on the personality and style of the president (and not just on institutionalised roles played by trained diplomats). In keeping with the nature of these informal club-like groups, Brazil often uses G20 and BRICS summits (often held close together) as a sounding board for Brazilian foreign policy preferences and pragmatically avoids making any sticky alignments or binding commitments within these groups. This approach works exceptionally well in the BRICS group, since it keeps options open by “playing up what the BRICS have in common and playing down issues on which they disagree”. 32 Brazil was comfortable with the gradual shift in the G20’s focus from that of “crisis breaker” to “steering committee” for global economic and financial governance. In the G20, it consistently demanded reform of the international financial institutions, especially International Monetary Fund (IMF) quota and voting shares, greater control over international capital flows and regulation of the banking sector, action on global imbalances and exchange rate volatility, orderly exit from quantitative easing (QE), and a better balance between monetary and fiscal policy approaches to addressing post-crisis recovery. 33 Brazil’s positions in the G20 responded to its specific macro-economic concerns and global economic conditions at the time of each summit, but there also was a consistent underlying thread to its arguments. Moreover, it repeatedly made clear that it not only enjoyed participating as an equal at the top table of global economic governance, but also accepted the responsibilities that came with this status. It understood the crucial importance of the G7 trusting it would act as a responsible stakeholder rather than exhibit ideologically motivated radical revisionist stances

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