What is the Group of 20? G20 Origins, Members and Summits

The Group of 20 (G20) is an international forum for economic cooperation between 19 countries, plus the European Union and the African Union. The forum involves high-level representatives from all of its members, who collaborate with one another to deal with global economic issues. The G20 emerged in 1999 and, since 2008, has gathered the highest representatives from its members in annual summits. These meetings help countries to coordinate their economic policies and to make the international financial system more stable.

Summary

• The G20 is a forum for economic cooperation that brings together 19 countries, the European Union and the African Union.
• It began in 1999 as a meeting of finance ministers and central bank governors, then became a leaders’ summit after the 2008 financial crisis.
• The group has no permanent secretariat, and its agenda depends on rotating presidencies and preparatory negotiations.
• Its members represent most global output, trade and population, but the forum’s legitimacy and effectiveness remain contested.
• Its summits are important diplomatic events because they combine crisis management, economic coordination and visible negotiations among major powers.

Origins of the G20

During the 1990s, there were successive financial crises with global repercussions. They affected Brazil, Mexico, Russia and some Asian countries. The collapse of these economies made it clear that the world economy was so intertwined that it needed more regulation. At the time, the Group of 7 (G7) advocated for creating an expanded forum with additional countries, so as to discuss these issues.

The Group of 20 began to exist officially in 1999, but it kept a somewhat informal structure. Most international organizations have a permanent secretariat and staff; the G20 was born as a rotating forum without that institutional structure. Instead, the G20 was to be presided by a rotation of members. Each presidency must cooperate with the one before and with the one after, as a means to ensure continuity in the operation of the group. This arrangement is called the “troika” (a group of three) and it persists to this day. This design makes the G20 more flexible than a treaty-based institution. It also means that the group depends heavily on political will and continuity between presidencies, as well as on the willingness of members to transform summit language into domestic or international action.

The informal design has practical consequences. Because the G20 does not legislate or enforce decisions, its influence depends on coordination, political signaling and follow-up by member governments. This makes the forum important during crises, but it also makes its commitments uneven.

From 1999 to 2008, the G20 was mostly characterized by the meetings of its members’ finance ministers and central bank governors. Those officials discussed and coordinated economic policies, and they received little media attention.

The 2008 financial crisis (also called Great Recession) would provide the impetus to upgrade ministerial meetings to a higher level. Beginning in that year, the heads of state and heads of government of the G20 countries would meet annually. The highest-ranking representatives of the European Union would do the same. This shift changed the public meaning of the forum: what had been a technical space for economic officials became a regular diplomatic stage for leaders who were expected to explain collective responses to crises.

Beginning in 2008, there was a series of meetings that gather lower-level government officials to discuss more specific or technical subjects. The preparatory meetings include Working Groups and Sherpa Meetings. In those settings, specialists in G20 matters work through technical questions before leaders meet. Much of the G20’s agreements come into being within these settings, rather than by the work of high-level representatives such as foreign ministers. This background process matters because summit declarations often compress months of negotiation into short public documents. The annual meeting becomes visible while much of the coordination work remains outside public view.

Members of the G20

The group includes 19 countries and two international organizations:

• The developed-nation members are Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
• The developing-nation members are Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey.
• The participating international organizations are European Union and African Union.

States and other entities that are not official members can participate in the group’s events by invitation. Some have been invited so frequently that they may be considered permanent guests. Such is the case of Spain, a country that still wants to become a fully-fledged member.

The G20 members represent over 85% of the global GDP, over 75% of the global trade, and about two-thirds of the world population.

This concentration explains why the forum receives so much diplomatic attention. At the same time, the G20 is a selective forum rather than a universal organization, which means that many affected countries remain outside the room when priorities are negotiated.

Summits of the G20

After the 2008 upgrade, G20 Summits began gathering world leaders and attracting greater media scrutiny. Summits create opportunities for eye-to-eye negotiations between national leaders and senior officials. At these meetings, leaders discuss pressing issues and sign off on declarations and agreements previously prepared by lower-level officials and diplomats.

Here’s a summary of all past summits and their main outcomes:

Summit chronology

The sequence below shows how the forum moved from crisis management into broader economic governance and geopolitical bargaining. In that sense, the summit list is best read as a chronology of changing priorities across meetings.

• 1st, 2nd and 3rd Summits (Washington, London, Pittsburgh) (2008-2009): In the wake of the Great Recession, the members agreed to a comprehensive reform of the international financial system. They began to clamp down on tax evasion and unregulated financial markets. They decided to reinforce the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and of multilateral development banks. They decided that the G20 is “a major decision-making body on matters relating to the global economy”.
• 4th, 5th and 6th Summits (Toronto, Seoul, Cannes) (2010-2011): The members agreed to limit their public debts and adopted stricter regulation for banks. They introduced the theme of development policy, called the Seoul Consensus, to their debates.
• 7th, 8th and 9th Summits (Los Cabos, St. Petersburg, Brisbane) (2012-2014): The members agreed to improve the sharing of tax information, in an attempt to reign in multinational companies who abuse tax havens. In addition, they highlighted social issues such as unemployment and inequality.
• 10th and 11th Summits (Antalya and Hangzhou) (2015-2016): Following the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe, the members discussed for the first time the migration and refugee movement. Other discussions involved the counterterrorism, climate change, social welfare, and another batch of financial reforms. For example, the members adopted G20 Action Plan on 2030 Agenda as a reference in terms of sustainable development.
• 12th Summit (Hamburg) (2017): The members placed an emphasis on fighting terrorism and on the “irreversibility” of the Paris Agreement. They also reinforced their commitment to the Agenda 2030.
• 13th Summit (Buenos Aires) (2018): The members discussed a vast array of contemporary themes — from food security to Fourth Industrial Revolution. Yet this meeting did not produce any tangible result.
• 14th Summit (Osaka) (2019): The members, once again, discussed many issues. This time, however, they succeeded in releasing an important statement on preventing the use of the Internet for terrorist purposes.
• 15th Summit (Riyadh) (2020): Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this meeting was virtual. The members decided to “forge a coordinated global response” to this health emergency. They also pledged to inject 5 trillion dollars into the world economy, and they suspended the debts of several developing countries. Both of these initiatives sought to boost economic recovery and they have had significant success.
• 16th Summit (Rome) (2021): The G20 continued to discuss several themes, but their focus was still on recovering from the pandemic. Another matter was the situation in Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover.
• 17th Summit (Nusa Dua) (2022): The members continued to mull over the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in the world economy. However, they did not sign any major documents signed at this meeting.
• 18th Summit (New Delhi) (2023): The members discussed issues related to sustainable development, economic recovery and technological transformations. They highlighted the “ human suffering and negative added impacts of the war in Ukraine ”. They invited the African Union to join the G20 — an invitation that has been accepted. In addition, as usual, there were some disagreements within the group. Vladimir Putin (Russia) and Xi Jinping (China) did not attend this meeting. The Chinese and the Saudis boycotted a meeting in Kashmir — a region disputed by India and Pakistan. Moreover, the Indian government protested against the release of an official Chinese map that places disputable land within China’s territory.
• 19th Summit (Rio de Janeiro) (2024): The members created the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty, the G20 Task Force on a Global Mobilization against Climate Change, and the Bioeconomy Initiative — all of those had been proposed by Brazil. From another Brazilian proposal, the members created the Social G20, a forum in which representatives from civil society can engage with the group and issue recommendations.

Criticism about the G20

While it was conceived as a means to regulate and stabilize the global economy, some critics argue that the Group of 20 has been unable to do both.

According to research subsidized by the European Central Bank, the effects of the group’s decisions on financial markets “are small, short-lived, non-systematic and non-robust”. The researchers concluded that the group exerts less influence, for instance, than unilateral decisions by the United States Federal Reserve.

Despite not bringing about long-lasting effects on the economy, the G20 remains an important venue for discussing global issues.

Yet, as the Council on Foreign Relations argues, growing political divisions have made it harder to achieve consensus within the group. The disputes connect war, debt, industrial policy and energy transition to the forum’s ability to reach consensus. They show that the G20 can assemble major economies in the same forum. The forum still cannot by itself remove the geopolitical conflicts that divide them.

The problem is structural as much as political. The G20 works through consensus and public declarations, so disagreement among major members can turn broad agendas into cautious language. That limitation does not make the forum irrelevant, but it narrows what it can deliver when members disagree on security, energy or development priorities.

The Group of 20 is also a target of the global Left, that believes the group simply promotes a capitalist agenda. Julia Kulik, an academic, says: “ Seeing 20-21 people making decisions that affect the entire world is not appealing to a lot of people ”. In the past, there have been anti-capitalist and anti-globalist protests in cities that host the group’s summits. In 2023, in order to avoid scenes of violence, the Indian government reinforced security measures in New Delhi.

As an attempt to ward off social criticism, the G20 has established Engagement Groups such as Business20 and Labor20. These groups allow organizations from member countries to participate. Still, they can only make recommendations, rather than decisions, in their sphere of influence. That limit is central to the criticism: participation can make the process broader, while civil society remains outside the authority held by governments inside the forum.

Conclusion

The G20’s intention was to increase the weight of developing countries in the decisions about the global economy. The representation goal was reinforced back in 2008, when the developed world suffered more as a result of the financial crisis. Nevertheless, in a world of about 200 countries, even the legitimacy of a 21-member forum can be contested. Indeed, its current significance stems mostly from its annual summits, which facilitate face-to-face interactions between leaders.

Long gone are the days when the world’s biggest economies could seal the fate of everyone in closed-door meetings. While their economic power continues to be gigantic, the voice of the developing countries gets louder and louder. So far, it seems the Group of 20 has lost its momentum. Perhaps it will never recover the amount of power it had when coordinating the response to the 2008 crisis.

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For more details about the G20, see the Background Brief that India prepared about it in 2023. The brief is available at this link.