Leaders of the world's richest democracies gathered in the Bavarian Alps on Sunday for the 48th G7 summit, held from 26 to 28 June. The summit began on Sunday with a series of bilateral meetings before discussing the most pressing global issues on Monday. These include Russia's invasion of Ukraine, soaring food and energy prices, C19, the global economy, as well as the climate crisis at a time when there is no shortage of global problems.

Although the Group of Seven, as the G7 is officially known, continues to lay claim to a leading role in the world, experts question the bloc's relevance in a rapidly changing global economy. Jim O'Neill (Jim O'Neill) and Alessio Terzi (Alessio Terzi) wrote back in 2018 that the G7 "in its current form no longer has a reason to exist and should be replaced by a more representative group of countries". They called for the creation of a G7 group in which Germany, France and Italy would be replaced by a single eurozone representative, Canada would be swapped for Brazil, and, most importantly, China and India would be added, thereby making the group more representative in terms of both the economy and population, without increasing the number of seats.

As shown in the chart, G7 countries currently represent 43% of the world's economy, which is nearly 70% less than it was three decades ago.
In terms of population, the G7 bloc is even less representative – according to the latest estimates from the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), less than 10% of the world's population lives in its member states. Despite these figures, proponents of the G7 believe that the group still holds value. "It is a sort of steering group for the West," says Stewart M. Patrick (Stewart M. Patrick), a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). "It is a repository of shared values, embodying both common values and a similar rules-based approach to world order."