G7

8 Key excerpts on "G7"

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  Developed Nations and the Economic Impact of Globalization

  • Ken Moak(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  147 The G7—made up of the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, Canada, plus the EU—was established in 1976 to address the Nixon Shock and oil crisis. Being a supranational insti- tution representing the richest and most developed economies in the world, the G7 was writing the rules and regulations of the global trade and financial orders, albeit less so since 2008. That year’s financial cri- sis exposed the G7’s economic and financial weaknesses: huge public and private debts coupled with an ineffective monetary policy toolkit, reducing its influence on the global geo-economy. At the 2008 meet- ing in Chicago, US President Barack Obama announced that G20 would replace G7 as the world’s official forum on global economic affairs. 1 The G20 is comprised of the world’s largest 19 economies plus the EU, including all G7 and BRICS members, accounting for over 80 and 85% of world GDP and population, respectively. 2 THE GROUP OF SEVEN The Group of Seven (G7) was an exclusive “rich nations club” com- posed of the world’s seven most developed and wealthiest nations. The organization, started as the “Club of 5” in 1973 at the White House (making up the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan), was established to discuss world affairs and how they might be addressed in the aftermath of the global oil crisis and the Nixon Shock. 3 Italy was added at the invitation of French President Giscard d’Estaing CHAPTER 7 The Group of Seven and Group of Twenty © The Author(s) 2017 K. Moak, Developed Nations and the Economic Impact of Globalization, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57903-0_7 148 K. MOAK to the club in 1974. US President Gerald Ford invited Canada to join it in 1976. The G7 accounted for over 65% of the world net national wealth (the difference between gross national wealth and liabilities), 45% of global nominal, and 32% of PPP GDP in 2015.

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  Comparing Emerging and Advanced Markets

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

    (Publisher)

  Canada , Japan, Italy, and Germany. The G-7 was renamed as the G-8 during 1997, when Russia was added to the original seven-country lineup. Ever since its inception, the G-7 and G-8 asserted several political and economic policies, which affected other countries.

  The G-7 and G-8 became known in the international scene as the major policy-makers, which could enforce or disrupt political and economic stability. The latest installment of the G-8 is called the G-20, a greater coalition formed in 1999 that included the nations of Brazil , China, Saudi Arabia, Republic of Korea, France, Australia, China, Canada , Germany , Indonesia, Argentina, Turkey, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Japan, United Kingdom, United States, and the European Union.

  While the G-20 is supposed to acknowledge all members as equals, it cannot be denied that the countries, which were included in its G-8 predecessor, have an advantage over other countries in terms of political and economic policy-making. So far, the G-20 goals for 2014 are to focus on growth and resilience.

  G-20 country growth strategies contain a mix of macroeconomic and structural reforms at the domestic level that suit each country’s circumstances in areas with the greatest potential to lift global growth:

  • Increasing quality investment in infrastructure.

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  Global Governance and Japan

  The Institutional Architecture

  • Glenn D. Hook, Hugo Dobson(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Although the G7 was originally created as a forum to deal with the turbulences in the international economy and problems of deepening interdependence during the 1970s, it now functions within the management process of a globalized political economy covering a variety of agendas and policy issues. Although Japan is politically and militarily a regional power, it has been an active participant in this global process of transition. The G7/8 seems to provide certain terms and conditions for those in power to occupy a safe and commanding position to play an active role in the management of global affairs. For example, after the cold war, the former superpower Russia was ‘allowed’ into the G7/8 because it was ‘democratized’ and had installed a full-fledged market economy. As is mentioned later, however, despite a sounding from Japan to invite China into this forum, other member states have been rather reluctant, because it is not a liberal democracy. In this way, the G7/8 has the virtual power to decide who manages and who is managed by limiting its membership and thereby informally demonstrating the international standard of political legitimacy. Through these developments, in some respects, the G7/8 controls the agenda of global concern by acting as a gatekeeper, with Japanese policymakers increasingly viewed as playing an active role in this process and the Japanese political economy as a whole occupying a significant position in it.

  Yet the G7/8 is not just a series of meetings among the world’s top leaders; it involves varieties of political processes and policy networks. The political economies of those advanced capitalist countries are, thus, organized into fuzzy interlocking networks of connections and influences. First, the G7/8 process involves wider bureaucratic machines and interest groups in these countries. They are quite active in attempting to influence the G7/8 negotiating process and shape what promises and pledges can and should be made. It is a formalized process through which the bureaucrats of these countries work together to bring about agreement as regards what constitutes the public agenda and general policy orientation on many issues; basically, the differing domestic policies of these countries are evaluated through agreed norms of policy orientation. Sometimes the real battle of words and ideas is fought among the bureaucrats involved. Through this process, bureaucrats from the G7/8 countries come into regular and close contact with each other, especially those working as assistants to their leaders: the sherpas. Their efforts before and during the summit meeting may create mutual confidence, private friendship and an esprit de corps

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  The Group of Seven

  • Andrew Baker(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 Obviously, each of the four spatial dimensions is in large part an arbitrary abstract construction designed to enhance and facilitate analysis of the collective activities and the interactions of the G7 finance ministries and central banks, but thinking in terms of these four spatial dimensions provides us with a way of visualizing the series of interactions that constitute the Group of Seven as an ongoing interactive process. It also enhances appreciation of the incentives and rationale for small groups of finance ministries and central banks to act collectively. This chapter looks at the series of interactions, routines, practices and relations that constitute the G7 process in terms of these four spatial dimensions.

  The most prominent scholarly voice on the G7/G8 has argued that the G7 represents a centre of global governance.2 According to John Kirton, a thriving system of working groups, various ministerial fora with the annual leaders’ summit at its apex, a range of innovative links with the rest of the world, together with the incorporation of more ministries into the work of the G7, have led to the G7 emerging as an international centre of domestic governance.3 Furthermore, an expanding G7 agenda and the establishment of a rhythm of follow-up procedures have enabled the G7 to become an ongoing annual system of governance, with the result that commitments are less likely to be forgotten because the institutional machinery below visible meetings reinforces the G7’s capacity to act as a reliable system of global governance. Kirton is not alone in pointing to the significance of the G7 coalition of states for global governance. From a more critical perspective than Kirton’s optimistic liberal institutionalist view of the G7, Stephen Gill refers to the G7 sitting at the apex of an ongoing and differentiated policy process consisting of neo-liberal elite consensus formation – a G7 nexus,4 while Robert Cox has referred to a nébuleuse, or process of consensus formation that is transmitted into the policy channels of leading governments, particularly finance ministries and central banks, resulting in a discourse that defines policies and circumscribes what can be thought and done.5

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  Global Politics in the 21st Century

  • Robert J. Jackson(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  G7.utoronto.ca, a website devoted to studying this topic. and transnational organized crime. Although to a large extent the G8 summits have become publicity shows, members generally comply with the deci-sions they have generated and codified. Compliance is particularly high in regard to agreements on in-ternational trade and energy. Summit decisions also help create and build international regimes to deal with international challenges and reform existing international institutions. 37 The G7 or G8 has been criticized for not reflect-ing the current economic balance of power in the world. Therefore, since 2000, leaders of countries such as Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa have attended the meetings, and the G8 summits have expanded to twenty members (see Table 12.2 ). The G20 was created as a response to the global financial crises of the late 1990s and to ensure that key emerging-market countries were adequately included in the core global economic discussions and governance. The G20 is composed of the finance ministers and central bank governors of nineteen countries plus the European Union. It declares its mission as promoting discussions be-tween industrial and emerging-market countries on key issues related to global economic stability. Criticisms of the G7, G8, and G20 Both positive and negative comments have been generated by these summits. They have been applauded (usually by themselves) for integrating the world economy and showing leadership on difficult issues. How-ever, they are also criticized as elitist and for trying to act like a world government without representation from the poorest countries. Clearly, the leaders and their spokespersons exaggerate their accomplishments, as there is no significant monitoring of promises made at the summits, and targets are set in a very general, elastic manner.

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  Britain and Japan in the Twentieth Century

  One Hundred Years of Trade and Prejudice

  • Philip Towle, Nobuko Margaret Kosuge(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  152 Chapter 1 2 JAPAN AND THE UK AT THE G8 SUMMIT, 1975 TO 2006 Hugo Dobson _________________________________________________ The highest level of diplomacy The Group of Eight (G8) summit process provides both a historical snapshot of more than thirty years of international politics and also a framework by which to structure and make sense of these relations. Its longevity and utility have surpassed several better known international institutions and organizations, such as the League of Nations, and it continues to provide the only opportunity in the calendar of international diplomacy for the G8 leaders to meet. The G8 first met as the G6 (France, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States and West Germany) in November 1975 at the Château de Rambouillet in the Paris suburbs. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the progenitors of the summit, sought to recreate at the prime ministerial or presidential level the behind the scenes, friendly but frank atmosphere of the meetings of the leading finance ministers (known as the ‘library group’ because the meetings took place in the White House library) they had attended when both served as finance ministers of their respective countries. Although intended as an impromptu, never to be repeated and informal meeting in reaction to both the 1973 oil crisis and the collapse of the Bretton Woods’ system of fixed exchange rates, the utility of this forum led to a second conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico in June 1976 at which Canada was invited to form the G7. Representatives of the European Community (EC), later to become the European Union (EU), Japan and the UK at the G8 Summit, 1975 to 2006 153 participated from the 1977 London summit onwards, and Russia formally joined from the 1998 Birmingham summit to create the G8 we know today.

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  Power and Global Economic Institutions

  • Ayse Kaya(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  7 The G20: a delegatory institution Under the leadership of the heads of state of a number of large advanced economies, including the USA, the UK, and France, the G20 reformed itself from being a forum for finance ministers and central bank governors to one for heads of state with its inaugural summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy on November 15, 2008, in Washington, DC. 1 The same advanced economies, along with Canada, had formed the G20 in 1999 with a view to addressing issues of international financial stability in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. 2 Less than a decade later, the inaugural summit of the reformed group came roughly a month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in the USA, which many scholars mark as the beginning of the greatest global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression. 3 In this respect, while a crisis among the emerging markets led to the creation of the G20, a crisis among the developed economies facilitated its upgrade. The reformed G20 did not end up as a momentary by-product of the 2008 global financial crisis. In their Pittsburgh Summit in September 2009, the G20 members declared their designation of the group as “the premier forum for [their] international economic cooperation” (G20 Pittsburg 2009). This elevation of the G20 meant the supplanting of the G7. Various leaders from the G20 member states have expressed the significance of the G20 for global economic cooperation. For instance, President Obama called the 2009 London Summit a “turning point in our pursuit of global economic recovery.” 4 Russian president Medvedev remarked, “it currently is the only forum where we can discuss issues of 1 Member states of the G20 are: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States.

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  War and Governance

  International Security in a Changing World Order

  • Richard Weitz(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  The Group of Eight What is now the Group of Eight (G8) was founded in 1975, when the heads of the six most powerful democracies of the time came together at Rambouil- let, France, at the invitation of that country’s president, Giscard d’Estaing. The political leaders of Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, and West Germany also attended. Referred to at the time as the first “Global Eco- nomic Summit,” the meeting’s purpose was to address the ills then plaguing the international economy. The most important of these included the energy crisis caused by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC) 1973–1974 oil embargo, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed ex- change rates, and the unusual combination of high inflation with low growth rates (later coined “stagflation”). 1 Although the summit was largely a French initiative, the concept enjoyed wider support given the dimensions of the eco- nomic crisis and the perception that the United States, having just lost the Vietnam War and experienced the trauma of the Watergate crisis, lacked the resources needed to restore the health of the global economy without the sup- port of the rising economic powers of Europe and Japan. 2 The leaders justi- fied their exclusive meeting by declaring, “We are each responsible for assuring the prosperity of a major industrial economy. The growth and stability of our economies will help the entire industrial world and developing countries to prosper.” 3 This first group of leaders decided to meet annually under a rotating pres- idency, gaining the moniker of the G6. Canada joined the process at the 1976 summit in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The president of the European Commis- sion and the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union began participating as representatives of the European Community (now the EU) in 1977, though not as formal members entitled to host the annual summit or 3 Chapter

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