What is the G7? And how it differs from the G20

The G7, or Group of Seven, is an informal club of seven large, wealthy democracies: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, with the European Union at the table too. Their leaders meet once a year to agree on how to handle the world economy, security and other shared problems. The G7 has no treaty, no headquarters and no power to bind anyone; it matters because of who is in the room.

In short

• The G7 began in the 1970s, when oil shocks and currency turmoil pushed the biggest Western economies to coordinate. Russia joined to make the G8 and was suspended in 2014.
• It works by consensus at a yearly summit, hosted in turn by each member, and its decisions are promises, not laws.
• The G20 is the wider version, created in 1999 and raised to leaders' level in 2008, which adds large emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil.

How did the G7 begin?

It started as a private meeting in a library. In March 1973, as the system of fixed exchange rates set up after the Second World War was breaking down, US Treasury Secretary George Shultz invited the finance ministers of West Germany, France and the United Kingdom to talk informally in the White House library. Japan joined later that year. The "Library Group" was the seed.

The oil crisis that followed, when Arab oil producers cut supplies in late 1973 and prices quadrupled, convinced leaders they needed to meet in person. French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing hosted the first summit at the Château de Rambouillet in November 1975, with six countries: France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. Canada joined in 1976, which made seven, and the European Community, the EU's forerunner, began attending in 1977.

Why is it the G7 and not the G8?

For about two decades it was moving the other way. After the Cold War, the group drew Russia in step by step: talks after the 1991 summit, a regular seat at the political sessions from 1994, and full participation from 1998, when the group became the G8. Russia hosted the summit in 2006.

That ended in 2014. After Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, the other seven suspended their participation in the Sochi G8 summit Russia was due to host, and on 24 March 2014 announced they would meet without it, as the G7, in Brussels that June. Russia said in 2017 that it would leave for good. The G7 has been seven ever since, and its members have used it to coordinate sanctions on Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

What does the G7 actually do?

The G7's main product is agreement among governments that together carry great economic weight. By the 2026 estimates in Wikipedia's G7 entry, its members hold about 10% of the world's population but about 44% of world output measured at market exchange rates, and around 28% measured by purchasing power, which adjusts for prices.

The presidency rotates each year in a fixed order, and the host sets the agenda. Through the year, each leader's personal representative, called a sherpa, negotiates the texts, and finance, foreign and other ministers hold their own meetings. The summit itself lasts two or three days and ends with statements the leaders sign. Hosts usually invite guest countries and international bodies such as the United Nations and the IMF.

Some summit promises have turned into real policy. In 2005 the G8 at Gleneagles backed cancelling the debts that the poorest countries owed to the World Bank, the IMF and the African Development Bank. In June 2021 G7 finance ministers backed a global minimum corporate tax of at least 15%, which more than 130 countries later endorsed at the OECD. In 2022 the G7, with the EU and Australia, set a price cap on Russian oil shipped by sea. Many other promises are vague or never met, and since nothing binds members, follow-through is up to each government.

The 2026 summit was held at Évian-les-Bains in France, from 15 to 17 June 2026. France invited Brazil, South Korea, Egypt, India and Kenya as partners, and the leaders issued a set of separate statements, on critical minerals, migrant smuggling, drug trafficking and geopolitical issues among others.

What is the G20, and how is it different?

The G20 is the bigger table. It was set up in 1999 by finance ministers, after a run of financial crises in emerging economies, from Mexico to Asia to Russia, showed that the G7 alone couldn't steady the world economy. It became a leaders' summit in November 2008, when President George W. Bush hosted the first one in Washington in the middle of the global financial crisis. At its 2009 summit in Pittsburgh, leaders named it their main forum for international economic cooperation.

Its members are 19 countries, the European Union and, since 2023, the African Union. Together the 19 countries account for about 85% of world output and three-quarters of world trade. South Africa held the presidency in 2025 and hosted the first G20 summit in Africa, in Johannesburg. The United States holds the presidency in 2026, with the leaders' summit planned for Miami.

G7, G20 and BRICS side by side

The three groups are easy to mix up. All are informal clubs with yearly summits, no binding power, and no permanent staff of their own.

	G7	G20	BRICS
Started	1975 summit, roots in 1973	1999 for ministers; leaders since 2008	2009 summit; name from 2001
Members	7 countries plus the EU	19 countries plus the EU and African Union	11 countries as of 2026, plus partners
Who	Large rich democracies	The G7 plus big emerging economies	Large emerging economies
Includes China and India	No	Yes	Yes
Includes Russia	No, since 2014	Yes	Yes, a founder
Shared institutions	None	None	A development bank

The G20 contains every G7 member and every original BRICS member, which makes it the one place where both sets of countries negotiate as equals.

Still argued

Whether the G7 still matters is argued. Critics say a club of seven countries with a falling share of the world economy can't speak for it, and that the G20 or the UN are the right forums for global problems. Defenders reply that the G7's small size and shared values let it agree and act in ways the larger, more divided G20 can't, as with sanctions on Russia and the oil price cap. Both points can be true at once: the G7 has lost weight in the world economy and gained cohesion among its members.

The G7's members are all democracies, which sets it apart from the G20 and BRICS. Three of its members, France, Germany and Italy, belong to the European Union, which attends in its own right.

Check yourself

• Without looking back: why did the G7 start, and what did the 1973 oil crisis have to do with it?
• Why did the G8 become the G7 again in 2014?
• What does the G20 add that the G7 lacks, and what does it lose?

Sources

• What is the G7? — G7 Research Group, University of Toronto
• G7 — Wikipedia
• G20 — Wikipedia
• 2026 G7 Summit in Évian — Élysée, Presidency of the French Republic, 2026
• Oil Embargo, 1973–1974 — Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State