Leaders favour conversion of G-8 and G-5 into G-14

With indications of broadbasing global governance, suggestions have been made to convert the grouping of developed G-8 countries and the G-5 emerging economies into a G-14 as a summit of leaders from these nations have favoured reforms of institutions of international governance and finance.

Hosts of the summit and Italian president Silvio Berlusconi, in his opening remarks at the summit of the two groupings yesterday, suggested some sort of a G-14 saying the G-8 and G-5 represented about 80 per cent of the world and "we may consider this as a stable format of the future".

The idea caught on when Brazilian president Lula Da Silva also spoke of G-14 and the need to review entire global governance.

Invited by the then French president Mitterand for the first time in Avian, the 5 "outreach" countries of India, China, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, representing vast populations and considering as major emerging economies, have been regularly attending summits with the exclusive club of industrialised and advanced countries on the sidelines of the G-8 summits.

Briefing the media, foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon said the leaders at the summit discussed global economic recovery and to fund resources to deal with the challenge of climate change and global warming. 

The common feature of discussions was the effect of the current economic crisis especially on the poor countries and how to take a coordinated approach to deal with it, especially the implementation of the decisions taken at the London summit of G-20 in April and to be further discussed at the G-20 summit in Pittsburg later this year.

On the crisis, there has been some discussions on the need for G-8 to resist the temptation of resorting to protectionist measures and for a common agreement between G-8 and G-5. There was a feeling that the "standstill" on the actionable measures of London summit noticed on the part of the developed countries and that should be reversed.

The end result of the discussions, Menon said, was that they need to work on international financial restructuring and on broader global governance and political issues.

It should be done in various other fora but there was no finality that it should be in G-14.

There was a discussions on how to deal with the global situation and current reality and the need to talk of reforms of the UN Security Council, World Trading Organization (WTO) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) and the international financial structure against the background of decisions to be taken by 2012 on voting rights in WB and IMF.

There was a considerable feeling that global governance cannot go on like this, an opinion shared by French president Nicolas Sarkozy.