Birmingham Summit Meetings: Group of Eight Leaders Focus on Asian Crisis, Monetary Cooperation, Debt Relief Issues

• Pages: 157-158

Page 157

Meeting in Birmingham, England, on May 15-17 for their annual summit, the leaders of the world's major industrial economies emphasized the importance of multilateral cooperation to enable all countries-particularly those at the low end of the economic and development scale-to benefit from the increasing globalization of the international economy. The key challenge, according to a communiqué issued on May 17 (see page 159) was "to ensure that the benefits of globalization are spread more widely to improve the quality of life of people everywhere." The 1998 meeting of the heads of state and government-renamed the Group of Eight to reflect Russia's first full participation in these annual summit meetings-was preceded by a meeting of the Group of Seven (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States) and the President of the European Commission on May 15.

Leaders of the Group of Eight countries and the President of the European Commission gather on May 16 outside the Western House during the Birmingham summit.

The topic of a new financial architecture in a globalized world was also addressed in London on May 8 by IMF Managing Director Michel Camdessus (see below). In his speech Page 158 Camdessus outlined two organizational avenues that might be explored to enable the IMF's governors to become more actively involved in the decision-making aspects of its work.

The Group of Eight leaders reaffirmed the key role of the IMF and other international financial institutions in helping to resolve and prevent future crises. Their communiqué stressed the need for the economies most severely affected by the crisis to implement IMF-supported reform packages fully. A key lesson from the Asian crisis, the statement noted, was the importance of sound economic policy, as well as transparency and good governance. The communiqué also called on Asian countries undertaking economic reforms to ensure that the private sector plays a timely and appropriate role in crisis resolution and that steps be taken to prevent hardship for the poorest segments of their population.

Calling for a "speedy and determined" extension of debt relief for the world's poorest countries, the communiqué strongly endorsed the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, launched two years ago, aimed at providing debt relief to countries pursuing economic reforms prescribed by the IMF. All eligible countries were...