ABSTRACT
International financial questions occupied the Group of Seven (G7) Summit repeatedly during the first 25 years of its life. This chapter reviews the occasions when the summits, up to and including the Cologne Summit of 1999, contributed to the design of the world's financial and monetary system. Four important episodes stand out in the Summit record. The first episode dates from the dawn of summitry. The second episode concerns the crisis over the debts owed by middle-income countries to commercial banks, which occupied most of the 1980s. The third episode concerns the Summit initiatives on debt relief for low-income countries, which go back to the Toronto Summit of 1988 but remained active up to Cologne 1999. The fourth and final episode concerns the search for new international financial architecture, provoked by the crisis which broke out in three Asian countries just a few days after the Denver Summit of 1997.
