What Is Group G7?
Group G7 is an international group of finance ministers, this group deals with the discussions of various economy and finance related issues of the concerning countries. Group G7 should not be confused with group G8. G7 and G8 are sister groups, both have same goal of economic concerns but they are independent of each other.
Members of Group G7
Group G7 is made up of 7 major countries of the world. The list of countries includes the names- Japan, USA, Britain, Canada, Germany, Italy and France. All these nations are designated as the industrial nations of the world, and all of them mark their presence in the group G8 also. One extra member of group G8 is Russia, this exclusion of Russia from group G7 is an issue of conflicts.
G7 was assembled in 1982, with a need of focus on the economy of the world. By observing the events of financial crisis, various countries came together on a common platform of group G7. It should be noted that, economy of different countries is interrelated with each other, so group G7 is in influence of the economies of all the countries of the world.
Concerns of Group G7
In the report of 1996, G7 acknowledged its developing importance and the importance of other countries to cooperate with one another. According to the report “a huge increase in the capital flows and trade, in the world causes the economy to become more complex and inter-connected”. With this statement, report tried to convince the world that major concern of the group G7 is to run stable economies through out the world and it is especially concerned with the economies of the member countries.
Criticism of G7
Group G7 is facing one important criticism, about the list of its member countries. This list lacks two extremely important names- Russia and China. Russia and China are the major players of the global economy. In Fact China stands at the fourth place in the world ranking of economies, this nation holds $1 trillion in terms of foreign reserves. Conflict of Russia is already mentioned before. To avoid these critics, group G7 invites various important countries to participate in the discussions of financial and economic concerns.
One another criticism of the group G7 is relative to its power of taking decisions. Critics, says that finance ministers, have no rights to take important decisions, because setting of the interest rates is in the hands of national banks. So, discussions of finance ministers have no base for the global economic decisions. On the other hand, others say that group G7 is not mainly concerned with the setting of monetary policy, but it helps in shaping up the political policies, relative to the economy of a country. These discussions help in shaping up the tax policies and international policies of commerce. So, it can be concluded that group G7 is playing an important role about providing a stable protocol of economy to the various concerning countries of the group and it also helps in resolving financial crisis of a particular zone of the world.
