Group of Eight leaders meet in Japan amid calls to take on new members

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TOKYO - The Group of Eight countries, holding their annual summit in Japan starting Monday, have always been a club for the world's biggest and brightest economies. Now a growing chorus is saying it's time the clubhouse doors swing open to some newcomers.

Outsider China has eclipsed more than half the club's members in economic size and the gross domestic product in Brazil is larger than Russia's.

"When do they move from the G8 to the G13?" asked Lael Brainard of the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-think. "None of these problems can be solved without the participation of countries like China, India, Mexico, Brazil and South Africa."

Indeed, the G8's grip on the world economy isn't what it used to be.

Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Russia and the United States accounted for 58 per cent of the world economy at current prices in 2007, International Monetary Fund figures show -- down from 65 per cent in 1997.

As the G8 members have moved well past their glorious high-growth periods in the decades after the Second World War, other countries have jumped to the fore as economies to be reckoned with.

Chief among them is China. It's $3.4 trillion economy is fourth-largest in the world, nipping at the heels of No. 3 Germany. Brazil has the 10th-largest economy, just behind Canada but ahead of Russia. After Russia awaits fast-growing India.

It's not only raw economics. The five countries mentioned by Brainard include serious military powers and the world's two most populous countries, China and India. In the global warming debate, China is vying with the United States as the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases.

"The world has changed dramatically," said Robert Hormats, vice-chairman at Goldman Sachs (International), who helped U.S. presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan prepare for economic summits. "The new global power structure is not what it was."

It wouldn't be the first time the G8 has changed its membership.

The group held its initial summit in France in 1975 with six members: the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy and the then-economic upstart in the world, Japan. Canada came on board the following year. Russia formally joined in 1997.

In recent years, as G8 countries have struggled to address the concerns of the rest of the world, such as poverty in Africa, the list of summit participants has ballooned, though the core countries still hold exclusive meetings.

A total of 22 heads of government -- the eight members, seven from Africa, and several from other leading economies -- will be at the summit in Toyako, northern Japan, and Japanese officials say it's the largest ever.

Members themselves are split over whether they need to formally open the group to new entrants.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has been outspokenly in favour, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown also supports expansion.

Others are not so sure. Host Japan, which has long basked in the honour of being the G8's only Asian member, has repeatedly shrugged off suggestions of expansion in the weeks leading up to the summit.

"Bringing together the heads of state of, say, 40 countries for two days of talks ends up constraining everyone's opportunity to speak," said Masaharu Kohno, the deputy foreign minister and the country's "sherpa" representative for pre-summit negotiations.

Then there's the question of democracy.

John Kirton, director of the G8 research group at the University of Toronto, argues the summit's founding principles included promotion of open democracy, and he said the group had played key roles in democratic transitions over the years, including Spain in the mid 1970s and the Soviet Union in the 1990s. By that criteria, China does not meet requirements for membership, he has written.

In any case, the outreach program and the inclusion of a representative of the 27-member European Union in the talks has vastly increased the G8's relevance and reach, he said. Instead of expanding membership, the group should reform by building up its institutions.

"The G8 on membership alone is a very large and powerful thing already," he said. "I think it's wrong to say the G8 has too few members, that it hasn't expanded fast enough, that it's losing relevant capability in the world."