Leadership Need Not Only Come From the G7

Korea has an opportunity to exercise historic leadership when it chairs the G20 meeting in Seoul. This will be the first time that a non-G7 country has hosted the G20 since the larger, more inclusive, group supplanted the smaller rich-country group in April 2009 as the premier steering committee for the world economy. With large emerging market and developing countries playing such expanded roles in the world economy, the G7 had lost legitimacy. It was high time to make the membership more representative. but there is also a danger that the G20 will now prove too unwieldy, in which case effective decision-making might then revert to the smaller group.