By Jorge Heine
As the financial meltdown continues, the good news has been US President Georege W. Bush's call for a G20 Leaders' meeting tomorrow in Washington.
Don't we have enough such meetings already? Yes, but not necessarily of the right kind. "Black September" underscored that we live in a globalized economy.
The subprime crisis that started in Wall Street spread like wildfire to the rest of the world, and the glee and Schadenfreude with which it was first received by many abroad was quickly dispelled as stock markets and currencies crumbled. Tens of trillions of dollars have been lost. Solutions are nowhere in sight.
The financial sector is about five times the size of the real economy, yet, the enormous financial imbalances that exist in today's world are unregulated and at least one source of the financial havoc we are witnessing.
Some have proposed the creation of a global financial regulator, which, necessary though it may be, is unlikely to be effected in the near future. More broadly, this reveals the deficits in global governance, of which the exclusion of China and India is a prime example.
With $1.9 trillion, China has a quarter of the world's hard currency reserves (up from 5 percent in 1990). Yet, it does not have a place at the table of the G7 Finance Committee (nor at the G8, for that matter), where issues of financial coordination among the world's most industrialized nations are discussed.
Everybody says China is part of the solution; yet, how should that happen if it isn't even a member of the club that decides such matters? Should it just send a check in the mail?
Yet, China at least is a member of P5 - the five permanent members of the United Security Council, thus having a voice on key international security matters in their premier forum.
India, another Asian giant, is neither in the G8 nor the P5, thus feeling particularly disenfranchised.
The G7 was established in the late 1970s to search for a measure of macro-economic coordination among the world's leading economies.
Formed by the United States, Germany, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Canada and Italy, its yearly summer meetings became one of the key exercises in summitry. Its selectivity made it effective, as leaders from the rich countries exchanged views in an informal setting which eschewed formal speeches for more productive give-and-take. In the 1990s, in the one gesture made by the West to post-Soviet Russia, the latter was invited to join, thus becoming the G8.
