The G20 was born from a string of financial panics in the late 1990s
A Mexican peso crash, the Asian financial crisis, Russia's 1998 meltdown and the collapse of a giant American hedge fund convinced two finance ministers that the rich-country G7 could no longer keep the world stable alone. Their answer was a wider club whose members now produce about 85 percent of global output.
Credit for the idea is contested. A 2004 Brookings report by Colin Bradford and Johannes Linn named Germany's Hans Eichel, then chairing the G7, as the prime mover. Bradford later called Canada's Paul Martin the crucial architect, and Canadian accounts describe the G20 as a joint project of Martin and US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Everyone agrees Germany and the United States were essential to making it happen.
The group was hinted at during the G7's Cologne summit in June 1999, formally set up by G7 finance ministers on 26 September that year, and met for the first time in Berlin that December, with Martin in the chair. For its first decade it gathered finance ministers. Since 2008 it has met at least annually at summit level, and in 2009 it proclaimed itself the main forum for global economic and financial cooperation.
Membership is 19 countries plus the European Union and, since the 2023 summit in India, the African Union, which took its seat formally in Brazil in 2024. The 19 national members hold about three quarters of world trade, 56 percent of humanity and 60 percent of the land surface; counting both unions, the group covers nearly 79 percent of people and about 84 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. Other states and organisations attend as guests, some permanently.
It sits in a lineage of postwar efforts to coordinate economies, alongside the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and what became the World Trade Organization. Analysts credit it with considerable influence, but critics fault its narrow membership, its lack of enforcement powers and its alleged tendency to sideline established institutions. Summits routinely draw protests, especially from anti-globalisation campaigners.
Source: G20
