ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of international institutions in implementing G7/8 commitments. It looks at the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank in implementing the commitments of the G8 summits. The chapter addresses the more philosophical question of whether or not there should be a role for the multilateral organizations (MOs). The G8 summit process is successful in securing international institutional support for implementing its commitments when the issues being examined are ready for action. In some years, the leaders' statements and communiques have discussed the general state of the world economy. In the early 1970s, the US Treasury Department initiated a project to forecast short-term developments in the world economy. The global outlook discussion was broken down into individual industrial economies essentially those of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), major individual and some regional groupings of the less-developed countries (LDCs) and the rest of the world.
