Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Fleming, Stewart --- "Europe, China and the Group of Twenty" [2012] ELECD 910; in Wouters, Jan; de Wilde, Tanguy; Defraigne, Pierre; Defraigne, Jean-Christophe (eds), "China, the European Union and Global Governance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2012)

Book Title: China, the European Union and Global Governance

Editor(s): Wouters, Jan; de Wilde, Tanguy; Defraigne, Pierre; Defraigne, Jean-Christophe

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781781004265

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Europe, China and the Group of Twenty

Author(s): Fleming, Stewart

Number of pages: 15

Extract:

3. Europe, China and the Group of
Twenty
Stewart Fleming

At the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in Istanbul in
2009, Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn dismissed as
irrelevant the regular meetings of the finance ministers of the Group of
Seven (G7) advanced industrial economies. He described the body, which
has been one of the most important venues for international economic
policy cooperation and coordination efforts since the early 1970s, as
effectively dead. `The old G7, I was about to say the late G7', he remarked,
adding, in an interview with television channel France 24, that its meetings
were `a bit without substance' and `floating in the clouds with
communiques which no longer interest anyone'.1 Instead, he suggested,
´
the international economic policy diplomacy which the G7 had engaged in
would in future be focused on the new Group of Twenty (G20), which
includes leading emerging market economies such as China, India and
Brazil, as well as the G7 members.
Strauss-Kahn was not alone in 2009 in playing down the significance of
the G7. Professor Barry Eichengreen, a leading authority on international
economic policy, has described as a coup d'e´tat the way in which the `G20
has seized power from the G7/8 as the steering committee for the world
economy' (Eichengreen, 2009).
But are the high hopes for the future of the upgraded G20 forum
justified? Has it really become the key international venue for international
economic policy cooperation, a place where China, now ...