Simply, it’s a meeting of the world’s 20 largest economies, the members 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 and the European Union (which itself is a group of 27 countries, the Czech Republic currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency and will represent the EU at this week’s summit).
Together the members of the G20 represent 85% of the world’s economy.
Meanwhile, the meetings haven’t started, but the drama has. French President Nicolas Sarkozy is threatening to walk out of the summit if the group doesn’t come out with a strong plan for a global system of financial regulations. Sarkozy recently has been slamming what he calls the “Anglo-Saxon economies” (read: the US and UK) for causing the global financial crisis in the first place. A spokesman for the French president said that Sarkozy wouldn’t sign on to any final statement at the summit unless it included “deliverables” – concrete ways to implement a global regulation system.
And according to a leading US economist, German Chancellor Angela Merkel “does not get basic economics.” Merkel has been a strong opponent to plans to increase government spending to stimulate world economies. But economist Adam Posen says that Merkel doesn’t understand the positive short term effect stimulus spending has on a nation’s economy and warns that Germany, which so far has weathered the global financial crisis fairly well, could suffer badly unless the global economic crisis eases.
The G20 summit opens on Wednesday.
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