nuclear-news

In less critical times, its members have struggled to find consensus, descending instead into self-interested bickering, and reforms the G20 has promised have dwarfed those it has actually delivered.

This week’s Brisbane meeting of the Group of 20 will be a crucial test: can it be a genuine agent for change, or just another tired horse on the merry-go-round of international confabs?

The G20 is unquestionably powerful. Collectively, G20 economies account for two-thirds of the world’s people, 85% of its gross product, and three-quarters of global trade.

Unlike the too-exclusive G7, it includes the emerging giants of China, India and Indonesia, along with broader South American, African, and Asian representation. But with only 20 members, it’s nimble enough to make decisions, as it demonstrated during the global crisis……….

In the midst of the [2008 financial] crisis, the G20 co-ordinated the massive fiscal stimuli being pumped into the world’s economies to pull them back from the brink. It redesigned international regulatory rules (through the Basel III agreement), and reformed existing international public institutions such as the International Monetary Fund………

“….if leaders start to lose interest in it, it just becomes yet another meeting in an incredibly-crowded international program, it becomes international space junk, rolling around, sucking up resources and time,” he says. [says Mike Callaghan, program director of the Lowy Institute’s G20 Studies Centre,]………..http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/10/g20-faces-crucial-test-credibility-brisbane-summit-looms