While some have expressed hope that the summit of leaders of the G20 group of the world's major developed and developing economies in Washington on November 15 2008 could prove a watershed in discussions on solutions to the global economic crisis, senior officials from a number of G20 countries have warned that not too much should be expected.

One of the key areas of discussion at the G20 summit will be the future roles of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, but given the diverse makeup of the group, there is no certainty of consensus.

The G20 is made up of Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the UK and the US, plus the European Union as a member in its own right. Not only has each been affected by the global economic crisis to varying degrees, but there are variances of opinions on issues such as the Bretton Woods institutions.

The summit is the latest in a series of high-level meetings that have involved varying permutations of multilateral groupings. In the fast-developing story of the crisis, it follows weeks of wildly varying performances on significant stock exchanges, various engagements between the IMF, World Bank and countries that have asked for help, and individual developments in the growing recession.

On November 13 2008, it emerged that Germany has entered a recession after government figures showed that the country's economy contracted by 0.5 per cent in the third quarter. This is the second consecutive quarter that the economy has shrunk after a 0.4 per cent contraction in the second quarter, the BBC reported.

The news followed just 10 days after a warning from the European Commission (EC) that the eurozone was on the brink of recession, with economic growth decreasing by 0.2 per cent in the second quarter.

An EC statement on November 3 warned: "In 2009, the EU economy is expected to grind to a standstill". A recession in the eurozone would be the first since the common European currency was adopted in 1999.

The EC has been coming up with a number of measures in response to the crisis, fleshing out principles agreed to at an October summit of European leaders. Most recently, the EC approved new regulations on credit rating agencies.

Talk ahead of the summit about a new Bretton Woods model has been fuelled in part by the IMF and World Bank themselves. On November 9, IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn called on the G20 summit to consider the beneficial role that the IMF could play in overseeing national regulations.

There was some backing for this general approach at a meeting on November 8 in Sao Paolo, Brazil, of G20 finance ministers and central banks chiefs, who acknowledged that the IMF had "an important role to play...in helping to stabilise and strengthen the international financial system".

The G20 finance chiefs' meeting said that the IMF should enhance its early-warning capabilities with due regard to systemically important economies.

The IMF has launched a review of its financing role in member countries. "The purpose of this review is to ensure the institution has the right instruments and policies to help all of its members-with appropriate safeguards of Fund resources-as they integrate into a world of growing and increasingly complex capital flows," the IMF said.

The World Bank has said that it "could make new commitments of up to $100 billion over the next three years. This year, lending could almost triple to more than $35 billion compared to $13.5 billion last year".

According to reports by news agency Reuters, at the G20 summit Japan is prepared to offer foreign reserves worth up to $100 billion to the IMF if the fund needs extra money to help emerging economies, a government source said. Japanese Prime minister Taro Aso will make the proposal at the G20 summit, the agency quoted the source as saying.

So far, governments around the world have pledged about $4.6 trillion for bank bailouts, credit guarantees and fiscal spending to deal with the fallout from the global economic crisis.

One factor influencing the approach to the G20 summit in Washington is that there is what may be mildly described as a high level of awareness of the forthcoming change of management at the White House.

Already some leaders, including French president Nicolas Sarkozy, have addressed themselves on the issue of the global economic crisis to US president-elect Barack Obama.

Obama, however, will not be attending the G20 summit, holding that the US has a serving president. Even though, reportedly, incumbent president George Bush indicated that he would have no problem with Obama attending the G20 meeting, the president-elect has declined to attend, instead sending two representatives, former Republican congressman Jim Leach and former Clinton secretary of state Madeline Albright. Leach and Albright will be available for informal discussions with leaders on the sidelines of the G20 meeting.

An indication of the Bush administration's take on the summit was given at a news briefing by Dan Price, special assistant to president Bush for international economic affairs.

Media reports quoted Price as saying that what was expected as a thorough discussion, of causes, of actions, near-term actions to be taken, longer-term actions to be considered, and, importantly, agreement on fundamental principles for reform.

"So I would say we are expecting an important and vigorous discussion with some quite concrete results," Price said. The G20 meeting was the first in a series and there would be further meetings, not only to review the decisions that may be taken at this meeting, but also to follow up and receive recommendations on areas where further work has been tasked, he said.

There has been some interest in the approach that Moscow will take at the G20 summit. President Dimitry Medvedev is on record as blaming the US for the global economic crisis.

The Financial Times, in a report on November 13, said that as for the G20, Medvedev has said he has plans to put forward, although they, too, remain vague. In his State of the Union address last week, Medvedev spoke about "new rules for world financial architecture" to replace the present "monopoly in this sphere", interpreted as a reference to the US.

The same day, a report by Russian news agency RIA Novosti, quoting a Kremlin source, said that Moscow did not expect any major decisions or breakthroughs to emerge from the G20 summit.

"We do not expect any major breakthroughs [from the summit], but it is likely to be a good occasion to discuss the issue and tell each other directly what needs to be done and where we see our partners' errors," the news agency quoted its source as saying.

There are, of course, different perspectives from non-G8 countries. News agency Bloomberg said that India's prime Manmohan Singh said that the world's most powerful economies should shield developing nations from the global financial crisis.

"Our message to the G20 will be that they must do everything in their power so that the process of development, particularly with regard to the millennium development goals, is not adversely affected by the global economic crisis,'' Singh told a November 13 news conference in New Delhi.

Brazilian president Lula da Silva has called for a greater participation of the emerging economies in multilateral organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank.

However, French finance minister Christine Lagarde said in an interview with Brazilian daily Valor Economico that the IMF had been reformed in 2007, "following many years of negotiations", and therefore "we must work with what we already have in our hands", Mercopress reported.

French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner was among those who sought to calm expectations ahead of the G20 summit.

"I'm not expecting big recipes coming out of the G20 meeting on Saturday in Washington. But, I am expecting, and after from the new administration, certainly a road map. Not only a road map but step by step, benchmark after benchmark, the works of the experts helping us to offer new regulations. This is certainly very important," Kouchner said.

The International Herald Tribune quoted Harvard economics professor Dani Rodrik as saying: "I will count it as a success if there is a clear path" set out for further discussions on financial regulation. "The best that we can hope for is some general statement on strengthening capital and liquidity standards, and improving credit rating practices," Rodrik said.