G20’s Emergence as Leading Global Economic Governance Forum

The paper reviews the series of G-20 high-level meetings which brought about an increase in the international significance of this structure for cooperation between industrialized and emerging countries, hence enhancing the accountability of the latter in addressing global economic challenges. Thus, G20 emerged as the main framework for the global economic governance, replacing the G8 format, and managed to at least give the appearance of a structure able to coordinate action, especially at the London Summit, the only one hitherto followed by harmonized anti-crisis policies. But with the transition from the acute to the chronic state of the crisis, pressure required for coordination seems to have weaken, G20 last meetings letting foresee the artificial union of rather different interests and lack of a coherent mechanism for leading the world economy beyond the crisis.