When Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomes the heads of the G8 nations to the northern German resort of Heiligendamm Wednesday, they will be joined by the leaders of Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa.
The G8 leaders will especially want to hear what Chinese President Hu Jintao and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have to say on the vexed issues of climate change and world trade.
Lalit Mansingh, a former Indian ambassador to the United States, said the G8 "are being forced to recognise the new emerging powers."
"A lot of international economic reports-by Goldman Sachs and others-say the Chinese economy definitely and the Indian economy possibly will overtake that of the United States quite soon.
"So the invites to India, China, Brazil etc are a recognition of that global clout. It is also a recognition of the fact that the West will have to share power with new emerging centres."
The so-called G8 plus five process formally began at the 2005 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair invited the heads of the five emerging economies to participate in the talks.
With a combined population of 2.4 billion people, China and India are huge, export-hungry markets for the world's biggest exporters such as Germany.
And as their burgeoning economies consume ever more coal and natural resources, any future global agreement on limiting global warming would be fatally flawed without their participation.
China's stunning economic growth has been achieved at a terrible cost to its environment.
On Monday it unveiled its long-awaited national strategy for addressing climate change but insisted its economic development must come first.
Crucially, Beijing also insisted it would not commit to any caps on greenhouse gas emissions.
Merkel on the other hand has vowed to use the summit to urge her G8 counterparts to sign up to mandatory limits on emissions.
China's position is clear-the developed world must help it to cut pollution.
"The consequences of restricting the development of developing nations will be much more serious than the consequences of global warming," Ma Kai, China's top economic planner, told journalists Monday.
In a briefing on the G8 summit last week, Beijing however dismissed the suggestion that, mindful of its growing economic muscle, it will block initiatives at the summit.
Meanwhile, just as leaders of the world's richest nations sit down to a three-day summit on Germany's Baltic coast this week, the ECB is widely expected to raise its key interest rates to their highest levels in five and a half years, analysts said.
The European Central Bank usually holds its rate-setting meetings on the first Thursday of each month but has brought forward this month's meeting to Wednesday owing to a public holiday in many parts of the euro area Thursday.
Wednesday also sees the start of a June 6-8 summit of the so-called G8, a club of the world's eight wealthiest countries in the plush seaside resort of Heiligendamm.
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