The Pittsburgh Citizen

The member countries of the G-20 account for more than 80% of world trade and two-thirds of the world’s population—but what, it may be fair to ask, about everyone else?

Last week, world leaders descended on Pittsburgh with a purported willingness to make hard decisions concerning bank executives’ bonuses, international finance regulations and trade agreements. But these decisions will affect not only their own nations, the scope of those decisions will extend to the one-third of the world’s population in those developing countries not given a seat at the table.

At the most recent G-20s in London and Washington, D.C., the issues facing third world nations took a back seat to the more immediate concern of stemming the international financial crisis. With the recession ebbing, however, this could change.  At a recent panel discussion presented by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, James Dobbins, director of the RAND International Security and Defense Policy Center, noted that “the development issues have been less prominent.”  Dobbins said, “But they will be reconsidered now that the crisis is dwindling.”

Despite this re-emerging concern among developed nations, leaders from developing and third-world countries were not walking around Pittsburgh last week. The panelists at the Post-Gazette event pointed out that the G-20 has had to walk the fine line between hearing the grievances of the underdeveloped nations and getting things done. “The more people you add to the conversation, the more difficult it is to get coherence,” Dobbins said.  He went on to say that as the collapse of the financial markets recedes and this common purpose dissolves, “it is going to be difficult to maintain coherence among this large a group.”

Indeed, the G-20 did not start as the G-20, but instead as the G-7. As former Foreign Minister and Chief Finance Minister of Canada, Barbara McDougall noted, the original group was composed of the most economically powerful democracies in the world: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. She went on to point out that now, “there is recognition that the G-7 and G-8 were not appropriate forums, and there was an initiative to expand that to include more developing countries.”

Accordingly, membership in the group was enlarged significantly within the past decade to include more countries. Nations like India, China, Argentina and Brazil, which were initially excluded for a variety of reasons ranging from a lack of democratic governance to insufficient production in the world economy, are now part of the global discussion.

But with a broadening membership, the character of the G-20 also changed. Susan Schwab, former U.S. Trade Representative in the Presidential administration of George W. Bush, commented that the dynamic of the G-20 is significantly different with the inclusion of more nations. “It’s more like a continuum of development,” said Schwab.  “There are no longer just the first-world countries…there are now countries [at the G-20] that still have poverty but are very competitive.”  In her view, these advanced developing democracies have created “a fascinating dynamic” at the recent G-20 summits.

It is this group who sat down last week to make decisions that will affect developing nations and their people.  And as the lesser economies of the G-20 assert their influence, politicians and protesters alike are wondering how globalization and new viewpoints might change the group’s choices in the future.