# data[].attributes.body
What is it? It's an informal forum where the leaders of the seven largest economies discuss important topics. Their opinions and decisions are non-biding so it is basically a get-together where they discuss what they think and form alliances and essentially work on their international relations and soft power.
Who is involved? USA, China, Germany, France, UK, Japan, Canada, Italy.
Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?
Because Russia was excluded since annexing the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in early 2014.
What are their objectives? They aim to share their ideas and possible solutions regarding global issues and also to ensure control over things like the fossil fuel market.
What are the positives about G7? They serve a great role in international relations and they put new ideas to the table. They also serve great help (economically) and to the UN.
What are the negatives of the G7?
They are in their majority western countries and they are the greatest economies, for that reason, they may lack representation of other regions like South America, Africa and other regions of Asia. They can also have major disagreements and that only brings more "noise" to global issues being discussed.
What have they achieved? They made a global fund against AIDS and launched the Global Apollo program to ensure that renewable electricity will be cheaper than coal electricity by 2025.

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What is it?
Its an informal forum/summit at which, leaders of member-states discuss important global topics. Their meeting and everything said there are non-binding, so this forumis just a way for these leaders to sit dwon and talk, and share their ideas.
Who is involved
UK, US, Canada, Japan, France, Germany and Italy
Their Objectives
As said before, these meetings serve as a way for these country's governments to talk things out regardingtopics like global warming, and just share their ideas and thought regarding these political topics
Their positive sides
It is considered to be the driving force behind several very important contemporary global projects. These being organizing 2016 Paris climate agreement and a global fund to fight Aids, which helped a lot of people
Their negative sides
Internal disagreements, no representation from whole of Africa, from Brazil and China as well as G7 meetings being criticized for topics discussed there that do not reflect modern political or econoics problems. All this can be consideed definite negative sides of G7 summit
Change from G8 to G7
In 2014 Russia got kicked out for annexation of Crimea, resulting in G8 turning back to G7 as is was in around 1971 when Canada first joined

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What is it?

It’s an international intergovernmental organisation that is made of the 7 largest economies of the world: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US which together represent 62% of the world’s wealth

What are their objectives?

Focus on the challenges regarding the world’s economic growth as well as monitor the oil market

What are the positives?

Supports the UN, engages the leaders of the countries to communicate,

What are the negatives?

It has no representation from Russian, Middle Eatern or African side. And China, India and Brazil aren't even members?? It doesn’t reflect the current state of world’s economics and often the members of the organisation have various disagreements on how to make their decisions

Why was it G8 and now its G7?

Russia was a part of it, however later on got kicked out because of Ukraine’s sovereignty violation

What have they achieved?

It launched a global fund against Aids, TB and malaria, saving 27 million lives globally since 2002.

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It's an informal forum

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usa, china, france, italy, japan, uk, canada

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russia got kicked out because they breached international law with the annexation of crimea

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Russia was suspended following its annexation of Crimea.
What are the positives about G7?
Supports the UN and engages the leaders of the countries to communicate and make decisions if they agree.
What have they achieved?
It launched a global fund against Aids, TB and malaria, saving 27 million lives globally since 2002.
What are the negatives of the G7?
Only has representation in north America, Asia and Europe and there is no representation from South America, Africa or Australia.
What is it?
It is an informal forum formed by 7 industrialized democracies.
What are their objectives?
The G7 leaders aim to address challenges affecting the growth of the world economy, like slowdowns in emerging markets and drops in price of oil.
Who is involved?
USA, China, France, Germany, UK, Canada, Japan and Italy.

# data[].attributes.body
Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?
- international political forum (1997-2014)
- and then Russia left -> G7
What are the positives about G7?
- new solutions can be tested
- could be called the 'lab' of the UN
What are the negatives of the G7?
It mostly rpresents western ideas and the ones of richer countries, some countries are not represented
What have they achieved?

What are their objectives?

What is it?

# data[].attributes.body
USA, China, France, Germany, UK, Canada, Japan, Italy
Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?

What are the positives about G7?

What are the negatives of the G7?

What have they achieved?

What are their objectives?

What is it?

# data[].attributes.body
What is it?
The G7 is an organization formed by the 7 largest economies of the world: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US
Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?
Russia was a member of the G8 until they decided to annex Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
The organization thought of it as a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty.

# data[].attributes.body
What is it?
is and organization form by the 7 leaders economies in the world
who is involved ?
-USA, China, france, italy, Japan, UK, Canada.
What are the positives about G7?

What are the negatives of the G7?

What have they achieved?

What are their objectives?

# data[].attributes.body
The G7 leaders aim to address challenges affecting the growth of the world economy, like slowdowns in emerging markets and drops in price of oil.

# data[].attributes.body
France, Italy, Japan, The UK, the US, Germany, China.
Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?
It's G7 now because Russia got kicked out.
What are the positives about G7?
It's a driving force where new solutions can be tested.
What are the negatives of the G7?

What have they achieved?

What are their objectives?

What is it?

# data[].attributes.body
USA, China, Germany, France, UK, Japan, Canada, Italy.

# data[].attributes.body
USA, China, Germany, France, UK, Japan, Canada, Italy

Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?
Russia left

What are the positives about G7?

What are the negatives of the G7?

What have they achieved?

What are their objectives?

What is it?

# data[].attributes.body
The countries with the seven most powerful economies of the world.

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Angela Merkel and her guests will pose for the group photo and say all the right things at their press conferences. The richest nations in the world, they will say, have never been closer, never more united in their commitment to solving the pressing problems of today. Yes, it's that time of year again: the annual G7 summit.

The get-togethers started after the first oil shock in the 1970s but have long since ceased to matter. The G7 is a moribund institution and has been for the past decade. As an instrument of the internationalism it was set up to pursue, it is hopeless. It should be scrapped.

It takes a number of ingredients to make an international body work. There have to be problems that need solving. There has to be some degree of unanimity about how those problems should be solved. And there has to be leadership to ensure that unanimity when it is not immediately forthcoming.

Only the first of those ingredients currently exists. The G7 has plenty to talk about: Greece; Ukraine; the next set of development goals and how to finance them; climate change; trade; the weakness of the global recovery; how to engineer the exit from the zero interest rate environment of the past six years; combating systematic tax evasion; and tackling inequality. David Cameron wants the Fifa scandal to prompt a wider discussion about corruption.

What it does not have, and has not had since 2010, is a common view about how to go about achieving any of these aims. When the global financial crisis was raging, ideological differences did not matter. The G7 nations all cut interest rates and they all ran bigger budget deficits in an attempt to stimulate growth. But the consensus did not last, and divisions opened up. The Americans said growth should take priority over deficit reduction; the Germans, backed by the British, said that without a rapid return to fiscal rectitude there could be no sustainable growth.

Nor has a dominant figure emerged who is prepared to take charge, someone prepared to chivvy the reluctant into agreeing to be ambitious in those areas where there is a degree of consensus, such as the repeated promises to support development in the world's poorest countries.

The one G7 leader who could do this is Barack Obama, and the expectation was that he would take up the mantle of leadership when Gordon Brown lost power in 2010. The US president has proved unwilling or unable to do so, with the result that the G7 leaders meet, issue a vapid communique, and hotfoot it back to the airport as fast they can.

For the past 14 years, the G7 has said it would spare no effort to complete the Doha round of trade liberalisation. It remains unfinished. The G7 is supposed to prevent beggar-thy-neighbour economic policies, yet its member countries are blatantly seeking to drive down their exchange rates to secure a competitive advantage.

There are specific instances where the G7 could - and should - be using its collective muscle but is failing to do so. The summit in Bavaria will be followed by three global summits in the second half of 2015: the first in Addis Ababa will look at financing for development; the second in New York in September will set the United Nation's sustainable development goals (SDGs) for the next 15 years; the third in Paris in December will seek a legally binding deal on climate change agreed to by every nation.

The G7 should be working backwards from Paris. It should begin by asking itself what sort of cuts in carbon emissions would be needed to prevent a damaging rise in global temperatures. Countries big and small, rich and poor, will all need to play their part in meeting this target and failure in Paris will make it a lot harder to meet the UN's sustainable development goals.

So the next question is how to help poorer countries make their growth sustainable, through help to make the transition to low-carbon energy infrastructure. That has financial implications, hence the importance of the summit in Addis Ababa next month.

A strong, confident G7 would be pledging money now, as it did at Gleneagles 10 years ago. That would increase the chances of the financing for development conference providing the money needed to achieve the SDGs and would vastly improve the chances of an ambitious outcome in Paris. Don't hold your breath.
The troika is supposed to build Greece up, not blow it apart. Time for a ceasefire
A second case for G7 action is Greece, where the risk of a default and possible exit from the eurozone has increased over the past week. Relations between Athens and its creditors have soured. Greece thinks the troika of the European commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are making unfair demands that will damage the economy and are impossible politically. The troika thinks the Greeks are not serious about reforming their economy and that providing any more financial assistance will be throwing good money after bad.

The G7 has been here before. In the 1990s, sub-Saharan African countries that had been poorly run found themselves burdened with debts that they had no hope of paying. Germany led the resistance to providing debt relief on the grounds that rewarding bad behaviour would simply lead to more of the same. Only after a protracted struggle was the opposition overcome.

Negotiations between Greece and the troika have centred on short-term issues, such as how big a budget surplus the country should run once taking account of the interest payments on its debts. But as Jonathan Loynes of Capital Economics has pointed out, the real issue is that Greece's debts are - like those of Tanzania or Zambia two decades ago - unpayable. Short of a miracle, Greece is going to need a big writedown. Greece currently has a debt to GDP ratio of 175%, but its creditors are assuming that it will grow by almost 3.5% a year on average in each of the next five years and that this will bring the debt ratio down to 120% of GDP, at which point the country might again be able to raise money in the financial markets.

This is fantasy stuff. Greece is unlikely to grow at anything like these rates, especially if saddled with a fresh dose of austerity. The IMF knows this, which is why it has been pressing, so far unsuccessfully, for a debt write-off to be part of any new financial deal for Greece. Obama knows it, which is why the US Treasury has been putting pressure on Europe to strike a compromise agreement with Athens. A coalition that included Obama, François Hollande and Cameron could put real pressure on Merkel. But it won't happen. Obama is not engaged enough. Hollande is too weak. Cameron needs Merkel to help him with his EU renegotiation. The G7 will wring its hands but do nothing. It has outlived its purpose.
Topics

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Scrap the G7 and its summit - it is hopeless, divided and outdated | Larry Elliott

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Angela Merkel and her guests will pose for the group photo and say all the right things at their press conferences. The richest nations in the world, they will say, have never been closer, never more united in their commitment to solving the pressing problems of today.

# data[].attributes.body
Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?

What are the positives about G7?

What are the negatives of the G7?

What have they achieved?

What are their objectives?

What is it?

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Introduction

The G7 is an informal bloc of industrialized democracies-the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom (UK)-that meets annually to discuss issues such as global economic governance, international security, and energy policy. Proponents say the forum's small and relatively homogenous membership promotes collective decision-making, but critics note that it often lacks follow-through and excludes important emerging powers.

Russia belonged to the forum from 1998 through 2014, when the bloc was known as the Group of Eight (G8), but it was suspended following its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region. The G7's future has been challenged by continued tensions with Russia and, increasingly, China, as well as by internal disagreements over trade and climate policies. In a sign of renewed cooperation, the G7 reached a historic agreement ahead of its 2021 summit to overhaul the global rules for corporate taxation. More recently, the G7 has imposed coordinated sanctions on Russia in response to its war in Ukraine, including a cap on the price of Russian oil. The group also launched a major global infrastructure program to counter China's Belt and Road Initiative. Those issues, along with climate change, food insecurity, artificial intelligence, and nuclear weapons, led the agenda at the 2023 summit in Hiroshima, Japan.

Why was the G7 formed, and how does it work?

The United States, France, Italy, Japan, the UK, and West Germany formed the Group of Six in 1975 to provide a venue for noncommunist powers to address pressing economic concerns, which included inflation and a recession sparked by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo. Canada joined the following year, and Cold War politics invariably entered the group's agenda.

The European Union (EU) has participated fully in the G7 since 1981 as a "nonenumerated" member. It is represented by the presidents of the European Council, which comprises EU member states' leaders, and of the European Commission, the EU's executive body. There is no formal criteria for membership, but all participants are wealthy democracies. The aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) of G7 member states (not including the EU) makes up about 44 percent of the global economy in nominal terms, down from nearly 70 percent three decades ago.

Unlike the United Nations or the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the G7 is not a formal institution with a charter and a secretariat. The presidency, which rotates annually among member states, is responsible for setting the agenda of each year's summit and arranging logistics for it; in 2023, Japan is acting as president. Ministers and envoys, known as sherpas, hammer out policy initiatives at meetings that precede the gathering of national leaders. Nonmember countries are sometimes invited to participate in G7 meetings.

What happened with Russia?

Russia formally joined the group in 1998, making it the G8. U.S. President Bill Clinton thought that admitting Russia to the exclusive club would lend the country international prestige and encourage its first post-Soviet leader, Boris Yeltsin, to hew more closely to the West. Clinton also believed that membership would help mollify Russia as the NATO security alliance opened its doors to former Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe.

Clinton's decision drew some pushback. Finance ministries, in particular, were wary of coordinating economic policy with Russia, which had a relatively small economy and large public debt. But Russia's backsliding toward authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin has provoked an even stronger reaction. Moscow's annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine in March 2014 resulted in its indefinite suspension from the group. Frictions between Russia and the G7 also grew over Russia's support for Syria's Bashar al-Assad, especially in the wake of chemical attacks linked to Syrian forces, and over Russian interference in U.S. and European elections.

As Russia's intervention in Ukraine escalated, the United States and EU ratcheted up economic sanctions in an effort to further isolate Moscow. But the Ukraine conflict has only intensified, with Russia launching a full-scale invasion in early 2022. In response, G7 countries have imposed unprecedented sanctions on Russia. These include phasing out imports of Russian oil and gas, a major source of revenue for Moscow, and barring Russian banks from transacting in dollars and euros. Other measures are aimed at Russia's industrial sector to curtail its military capabilities. G7 members have also collectively pledged more than $100 billion dollars in financial aid to Ukraine, and every member but Japan has provided weapons.

What other challenges has the group faced?

Experts hoped that the reconstituted G7 would have the potential to better facilitate collective action. Without Russia, the group was more "like-minded and capable," according to former CFR fellow Stewart M. Patrick, with both common interests and common values. However, President Donald Trump challenged G7 unity on a number of issues, with trade and climate chief among them, contending that U.S. allies took advantage of the United States. Trump also split with the group by calling for Russia's readmission to the bloc. Other challenges stem from China's rise as a military and economic power, increasing nuclear proliferation, and the rise of artificial intelligence.

At his first G7 summit, in 2017, Trump refused to commit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate and hinted at plans to withdraw from the deal, leading other members to take the unusual step of singling out the United States in their final communiqué. In an unprecedented statement following the summit, then German Chancellor Angela Merkel questioned the cohesiveness of the transatlantic relationship, saying that for the first time since World War II, Europe "must take our fate into our own hands." Other leaders and many analysts were alarmed by Trump's testy relationship with the rest of the group during his presidency. At the same time, European leaders of the G7 have contended with a laundry list of regional challenges, including navigating the UK's withdrawal from the EU and maintaining cohesion amid rising nationalism.

Alongside the Russia challenge, CFR's Sheila A. Smith argues that the G7 will have to respond to China's growing ambitions. Previously, China's repression of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region and its crackdown in Hong Kong drew condemnation from G7 members, and its massive Belt and Road Initiative has prompted concerns about Beijing's influence over developing countries. Brussels, Tokyo, and Washington have all shared grievances over Beijing's state-led economic model and alleged unfair trading practices. China's growing trade and defense ties with Russia have also caused concerns. But there are reportedly divisions within the group over how to respond to China, as some European countries are leery of jeopardizing commercial ties with the world's second-largest economy. At the 2022 summit, assembled leaders overhauled the 2021 Build Back Better World initiative, creating the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment as an alternative to Belt and Road. The G7 pledged $600 billion in public and private investment for the new strategy, though it's unclear whether the group will be able to match the resources that China has devoted to its project. As of May 2023, the United States has mobilized $30 billion in public and private investment toward the project.

Fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine has created additional obstacles. In 2020, the sharp global economic contraction caused by the pandemic forced G7 governments to respond with massive stimulus measures. In many countries, economic recovery has been accompanied by record levels of inflation and food insecurity. Meanwhile, repeated nuclear threats by Putin, alongside an increasingly bellicose North Korea, have reinvigorated worries about nuclear weapons. "While it may seem passé to call for a world without nuclear weapons, there is fresh impetus for a renewed international effort to mitigate the possibility of nuclear weapons use," Smith writes. Some experts fear that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence could raise the risk of nuclear conflict.

Are there alternatives to the G7?

In addition to its internal divisions, external dynamics have chipped away at the G7's global influence, many analysts note. Some argue that the group lacks relevance without China and other emerging global powers. In 2021, the Financial Times' Gideon Rachman wrote that "the fact the G7 no longer represents most of the global economy-and is skewed towards the Euro-Atlantic region-remains a problem." However, leaders from outside the G7 are frequently invited to G7 summits. Australia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Korea, and Vietnam all participated in 2023.

Many analysts believe that the power and prestige of the Group of Twenty (G20), a forum for finance ministers and central bank governors from nineteen of the world's largest countries and the EU, has surpassed that of the G7. Emerging powers including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and South Africa, whose absence from the G7 was often noted, all belong to the G20. Russia remains a member of the G20, despite calls by some G7 countries for its removal. The group's member states represent about 78 percent of global GDP and three-fifths of the world's population.

Many observers argue that the G20 was most effective during the 2007-08 global financial crisis. G20 leaders first met in Washington in 2008, after the fall of the investment bank Lehman Brothers. While such consensus has been harder to come by in the years since the crisis, G20 summits have been the occasion for setting ambitious goals. At the 2014 summit, hosted by Australia, leaders adopted a plan to boost their economies by a collective 2.1 percent, which they did not achieve. In Hangzhou, China, in 2016, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping used the summit to jointly announce their accession to the Paris Agreement.

Yet, at the 2017 meeting, in Germany, the G20 ran into the same problems the G7 has come across in recent years, as countries proved divided by trade issues; the United States blocked a planned reference in the communiqué to the need to "resist all forms of protectionism." The following year, in Argentina, the G20 achieved what the G7 could not, releasing a communiqué to which all its members agreed. But, as critics pointed out, this consensus was only made possible by sidestepping disagreements on trade, climate change, and migration.

There are also calls for new multilateral arrangements. Some experts have endorsed an expansion of the G7 to include Australia, India, and South Korea, thereby forming a " D10" group of democracies. The Washington-based think tank Atlantic Council has held meetings of officials and analysts from those countries since 2014; however, there are growing concerns about democratic backsliding in India. While president, Trump floated the idea of a Group of Eleven, comprising the D10 countries and Russia.

CFR President Richard Haass and Senior Fellow Charles A. Kupchan have called for a new concert of powers comprising the United States, China, the EU, India, Japan, and Russia, reminiscent of the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe. The proposed system would have permanent representatives supported by a secretariat to avoid what Haass and Kupchan describe as the "fly-in, fly-out" nature of G7 and G20 summits. The group would be focused on practical cooperation rather than ideological alignment to avoid "haggling over detailed, but often anodyne, communiqués."

What's next for the G7?

Patrick says the G7 still has value because all member countries are grappling with similar issues. "It's sort of a manageable steering group of the West," he says. "They're a repository, an embodiment of common values and a similar rules-based approach to world order." In addition, the G7 can serve as a useful platform for "prenegotiation," he says, allowing members to hash out disagreements before taking proposals to the G20 or other forums.

At the 2023 summit, the war in Ukraine remained a major agenda item. Discussions focused on maintaining support for Ukraine ahead of its planned counteroffensive and cracking down on sanctions circumvention. The bloc also discussed the worsening global food crisis, which stems in part from the war. At the 2022 summit, the G7 called on Russia to cease attacks [PDF] on Ukrainian agricultural infrastructure and pledged $4.5 billion for improving global food security.

Climate concerns also remain at the forefront; German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has said he wants to develop the G7 into a " climate club." Ahead of the 2023 summit, G7 ministers committed to a new joint agreement on climate protection and energy security. Among other commitments, the countries agreed to increase offshore wind and solar capacity by 2030, but stopped short of setting the same deadline for phasing out coal or restricting investments in natural gas. The efforts are part of a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, a goal that G7 leaders reiterated at the summit in Hiroshima. However, climate efforts could take a back seat as members focus on curbing energy prices.

Another problem for the bloc is managing the dual threat of Russia and China while maintaining cohesion. While the United States has at times taken a confrontational approach toward China, other members are less keen to provoke confrontation with Beijing. The G7 could therefore try to avoid alienating China as it tries to further isolate Russia. During a trip to China prior to the G7 summit in 2023, French President Emmanuel Macron said the EU should avoid becoming pulled into a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan, drawing backlash from some U.S. lawmakers. At the 2022 summit, the group rebuked China for human rights abuses but also urged the country to use its influence with Russia to stop the war in Ukraine.

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The Group of Seven (G7) serves as a forum to coordinate global policy, but experts are increasingly questioning the group's relevance.

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Angela Merkel and her guests will pose for the group photo and say all the right things at their press conferences. The richest nations in the world, they will say, have never been closer, never more united in their commitment to solving the pressing problems of today. Yes, it's that time of year again: the annual G7 summit.

The get-togethers started after the first oil shock in the 1970s but have long since ceased to matter. The G7 is a moribund institution and has been for the past decade. As an instrument of the internationalism it was set up to pursue, it is hopeless. It should be scrapped.

It takes a number of ingredients to make an international body work. There have to be problems that need solving. There has to be some degree of unanimity about how those problems should be solved. And there has to be leadership to ensure that unanimity when it is not immediately forthcoming.

Only the first of those ingredients currently exists. The G7 has plenty to talk about: Greece; Ukraine; the next set of development goals and how to finance them; climate change; trade; the weakness of the global recovery; how to engineer the exit from the zero interest rate environment of the past six years; combating systematic tax evasion; and tackling inequality. David Cameron wants the Fifa scandal to prompt a wider discussion about corruption.

What it does not have, and has not had since 2010, is a common view about how to go about achieving any of these aims. When the global financial crisis was raging, ideological differences did not matter. The G7 nations all cut interest rates and they all ran bigger budget deficits in an attempt to stimulate growth. But the consensus did not last, and divisions opened up. The Americans said growth should take priority over deficit reduction; the Germans, backed by the British, said that without a rapid return to fiscal rectitude there could be no sustainable growth.

Nor has a dominant figure emerged who is prepared to take charge, someone prepared to chivvy the reluctant into agreeing to be ambitious in those areas where there is a degree of consensus, such as the repeated promises to support development in the world's poorest countries.

The one G7 leader who could do this is Barack Obama, and the expectation was that he would take up the mantle of leadership when Gordon Brown lost power in 2010. The US president has proved unwilling or unable to do so, with the result that the G7 leaders meet, issue a vapid communique, and hotfoot it back to the airport as fast they can.

For the past 14 years, the G7 has said it would spare no effort to complete the Doha round of trade liberalisation. It remains unfinished. The G7 is supposed to prevent beggar-thy-neighbour economic policies, yet its member countries are blatantly seeking to drive down their exchange rates to secure a competitive advantage.

There are specific instances where the G7 could - and should - be using its collective muscle but is failing to do so. The summit in Bavaria will be followed by three global summits in the second half of 2015: the first in Addis Ababa will look at financing for development; the second in New York in September will set the United Nation's sustainable development goals (SDGs) for the next 15 years; the third in Paris in December will seek a legally binding deal on climate change agreed to by every nation.

The G7 should be working backwards from Paris. It should begin by asking itself what sort of cuts in carbon emissions would be needed to prevent a damaging rise in global temperatures. Countries big and small, rich and poor, will all need to play their part in meeting this target and failure in Paris will make it a lot harder to meet the UN's sustainable development goals.

So the next question is how to help poorer countries make their growth sustainable, through help to make the transition to low-carbon energy infrastructure. That has financial implications, hence the importance of the summit in Addis Ababa next month.

A strong, confident G7 would be pledging money now, as it did at Gleneagles 10 years ago. That would increase the chances of the financing for development conference providing the money needed to achieve the SDGs and would vastly improve the chances of an ambitious outcome in Paris. Don't hold your breath.
The troika is supposed to build Greece up, not blow it apart. Time for a ceasefire
A second case for G7 action is Greece, where the risk of a default and possible exit from the eurozone has increased over the past week. Relations between Athens and its creditors have soured. Greece thinks the troika of the European commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are making unfair demands that will damage the economy and are impossible politically. The troika thinks the Greeks are not serious about reforming their economy and that providing any more financial assistance will be throwing good money after bad.

The G7 has been here before. In the 1990s, sub-Saharan African countries that had been poorly run found themselves burdened with debts that they had no hope of paying. Germany led the resistance to providing debt relief on the grounds that rewarding bad behaviour would simply lead to more of the same. Only after a protracted struggle was the opposition overcome.

Negotiations between Greece and the troika have centred on short-term issues, such as how big a budget surplus the country should run once taking account of the interest payments on its debts. But as Jonathan Loynes of Capital Economics has pointed out, the real issue is that Greece's debts are - like those of Tanzania or Zambia two decades ago - unpayable. Short of a miracle, Greece is going to need a big writedown. Greece currently has a debt to GDP ratio of 175%, but its creditors are assuming that it will grow by almost 3.5% a year on average in each of the next five years and that this will bring the debt ratio down to 120% of GDP, at which point the country might again be able to raise money in the financial markets.

This is fantasy stuff. Greece is unlikely to grow at anything like these rates, especially if saddled with a fresh dose of austerity. The IMF knows this, which is why it has been pressing, so far unsuccessfully, for a debt write-off to be part of any new financial deal for Greece. Obama knows it, which is why the US Treasury has been putting pressure on Europe to strike a compromise agreement with Athens. A coalition that included Obama, François Hollande and Cameron could put real pressure on Merkel. But it won't happen. Obama is not engaged enough. Hollande is too weak. Cameron needs Merkel to help him with his EU renegotiation. The G7 will wring its hands but do nothing. It has outlived its purpose.
Topics

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Scrap the G7 and its summit - it is hopeless, divided and outdated | Larry Elliott

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Angela Merkel and her guests will pose for the group photo and say all the right things at their press conferences. The richest nations in the world, they will say, have never been closer, never more united in their commitment to solving the pressing problems of today.

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7 Funny Moments You Missed From the G7 in Biarritz

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Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, United States.

Why was it a G8 and now it's a G7?
Russia became a member of the G7 in 1994, making it the G8, but were kicked out after they illegitimately annexed Crimea in 2014. They they evicted Russia because they didn't live up to the international 'code' of behaviour the other countries were set on following.

What are the positives about G7?
They work together with the EU, which is represented by the presidents of the European Council. Without Russia, they are more liked minded and have common goals, which makes it easier to discuss those issues and set goals. They come across issues that can later be discussed in other IGO meetings, such as in the G20, where there are more members present.

What are the negatives of the G7?
They failed to find a solution for Greece to pay back their debts of 175% their GDP, which is growing by 3.5% per year. The do not have one dominant leader. They do not make concrete plans or solutions (they are not required to either). It refuses to add other developed economic countries countries with high populations, like China, Brazil and India. Trump is making it increasingly more difficult to agree on topics and he wants Russia to come back to the G7, something that the other countries are opposed to.

What have they achieved?
The Global Apollo program was launched from a meeting in 2015 to ensure that renewable electricity will be cheaper than coal electricity by 2025. They work together with other international organisations (such as the IMF, the World Bank and the UN) to come to resolutions to peacefully solve conflicts.

What are their objectives?
Place sanctions against Russia, want to have cut down the use of fossil fuels to 0 by 2100 and eradicate poverty.  They also aimed to aid noncommunist powers in terms of economic support (when there is a question of inflation or a recession) when they founded it.

What is it?
It was founded in 1975 with six states as member, France, Germany, Italy, Japan UK and US. It is an informal intergovernmental organisation. Collectively, they have over half of the worlds GDP.