The Significance of the Economic Summits

It is argued here that the summits should not be transformed or elevated to some system of global economic governance. Rather, global economic stability depends on good domestic economic policymaking and, thus, the economic summits cannot substitute for effective and effcient policymaking within sovereign nations. The summits, therefore, should be seen first and foremost as a means for improving and generating better domestic policies via cooperation as opposed to delivering packages of coordinated policies. By focusing on international economic policy cooperation, the summits can contribute much to improving domestic economic policymaking. The protest at the Genoa summit and the events of September 11 provide a well-timed opportunity to rethink the format of the summits, to streamline the process, and to return to the European or Rambouillet model of summitry. Perhaps this is the path the summits are on following the �secluded and intimate� 2002 summit in Kananaskis (Bayne, 2002). The world was a very uncertain place in 1975. There were oil shocks, an unsettled foreign-exchange system, and a global recession. The original summit was formed to deal with these uncertainties. The world is again an uncertain place, with financial crises, the emergence of Russia and China as political and economic forces, terrorist attacks on the United States, an economic downturn among the advanced economies, and turbulence in the world�s equity markets. The annual summits remain as a significant forum for sharing information and reducing this uncertainty.