Towards Better Governance by the G-20: Learning from the 'Missing' ggg-8 Countries

Consider a very different “group-of-8” countries: Botswana, Chile, Mauritius, Uruguay, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore and Switzerland.  Do they have any relevance for the G-20?  Hardly, at first.  None of them are invited to the London G-20 Summit next week.  They are not G-20 members, since neither their economic size nor their population are large enough, and they lack the global “systemic significance” of most G-20 members.  None of them belongs to the EU.  This particular "group-of-8" in fact does not really exist as a formal body.

But there is a neglected rationale for the leaders of the G-20 to pay attention to this particular set of uninvited countries.  Like the G-20, they comprise a rather diverse group of developing and developed countries from different regions of the world.  But, unlike most of the G-20, this group of eight countries have exhibited high quality of national governance.

No country is perfect, obviously.  Each one in this group of 8 industrialized and emerging economies has its own challenges. But overall their quality of governance (and recent trends) exceed those of the Group-of-20, and to an extent even those of the powerful, formal, and elite Group-of-8.

This does matter.  Not just because failures of governance (among key nations in  the G-20) played a major role in today's financial crisis.  It also matters because lessons can be drawn for short and longer term initiatives from the good governance experiences from this group of 8 small countries (in short 'ggg-8' ifor this 'good governance group'-- and not in caps, since they are small, and not a formal group...).

This ggg-8 may be uninvited to the G-20 Summit.  But their experiences and lessons ought not be ignored.  This is the subject of my short article contribution to a Brookings compendium covering on many themes, being released now just before the London Summit on April 2nd.