ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the finance and foreign ministers’ joint pre-summit meeting that took place for the first time in 1998. Group of Seven (G7) trade ministers met at the 1978 and 1993 summits, and the 1981 Ottawa Summit created the Trade Ministers’ Quadrilateral which brings together ministers from the US, Canada, Japan and the European Union. The impetus for the G7 environment ministers to form their own forum began around the time of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in 1992. An interesting institutional development was the establishment, by the 1993 Tokyo Summit, of the Support Implementation Group (SIG) on assistance to Russia. SIG had a secretariat whose role was to co-ordinate G7 action concerning taxation aspects of assistance; to serve as an information source on external assistance to Russia; to be a research centre on problems of assistance implementation. On 31 December 1997, SIG ceased functioning as a secretariat to G7 embassies on assistance to Russia.
