Which of the following country is not a member of G7 ?

Question

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Correct — B, Russia. The G7 is a grouping of seven advanced industrial democracies — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Canada — which meet annually at leaders' level and continuously at ministerial and official level. The European Union also participates, represented by the Presidents of the European Council and of the European Commission, but it is not counted as one of the seven and does not hold the rotating presidency. Russia is not on that list, and the reason it feels as though it should be is genuine history rather than confusion. The group began as six at Rambouillet in France in 1975 — France, the United States, the United Kingdom, West Germany, Japan and Italy — with Canada added the following year to make seven. After the Cold War, Russia was progressively drawn into the political side of the summits during the 1990s and became a full participant, so that from 1998 the grouping was routinely called the G8. That lasted sixteen years. In March 2014, following Russia's annexation of Crimea, the other members suspended Russia's participation and cancelled the planned Sochi summit, meeting instead at Brussels; Russia has not returned, and the forum has been the G7 ever since. France, the United States and Italy — options (a), (c) and (d) — are all founding members from the summits of 1975 and 1976. The G7 has no charter, no treaty and no permanent secretariat; it is a coordinating forum whose weight comes from the combined economic size of its members, and its presidency rotates annually among them, with the holder hosting the summit and setting the agenda.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A founding member, and the host of the first summit. President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing convened the leaders of six industrial democracies at Rambouillet in November 1975 in the aftermath of the oil shock and the collapse of the Bretton Woods exchange-rate system, which is the meeting the whole institution dates from.  (c) A founding member and by far the largest economy in the group. The United States was at Rambouillet in 1975 and has hosted the summit repeatedly since; any list of advanced industrial democracies that excluded it would be meaningless.  (d) Also a founding member from 1975, and the least conspicuous of the seven, which is why it is the option a hurried candidate is likeliest to strike out. Italy has hosted the summit several times, including at Genoa in 2001 and in Apulia in 2024.

Concept: International groupings divide into treaty-based organisations with charters and secretariats, and informal forums that exist only in the willingness of their members to meet. The United Nations, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund are of the first kind. The G7, the G20 and BRICS are of the second: no founding treaty, no permanent staff, no binding decisions, and a presidency that rotates annually with the host setting the agenda. The G7 emerged from the economic turbulence of the mid-1970s as a way for the large market economies to coordinate macroeconomic policy, and it has widened over time into foreign policy, security, climate and development. The G20, created at finance-minister level in 1999 and raised to leaders' level in 2008 during the global financial crisis, is the wider forum in which the emerging economies including India sit alongside the G7 — and its membership is now twenty-one, since the African Union was admitted as a permanent member at the New Delhi summit in September 2023.

State PCS 2025 Q30 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q30 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer