Recent polls indicate Canada's current minority government enjoys 33 or 34 percent of popular support. Almost half of those polled said they were unhappy or very unhappy with what the prime minister had done so far to mitigate the effects of the recession. Without the summit, support might have been dragged down farther by all the troubling economic news. However, the stock market responded positively, closing April 3 at a three-month high, which was an indication of a growing confidence in the markets. The Canadian dollar's value increased.

The G20 meeting is commonly seen as a success because it lays out "new rules for global capitalism." Due to President Sarkozy's emphatic threat "to leave an empty chair at the dinner" if his proposals were not followed.

Perceptions of the G20 Summit are not independent of broader ideological and theoretical commitments of commentators and their sense of causes and effects of this crisis. It would be, particularly for a country like India, hard to pretend that there is a unified perception.

The South African economy is heading for its first recession since 1992, after 16 years of uninterrupted, albeit somewhat anemic, growth. Consequently, the first priority was to ensure that the short-term agenda outlined during the Washington Summit was adequately addressed, with appropriate measures taken in the major developed countries to underpin growth.

The global crisis has opened up the issue that has long been dormant in British politics: whether it is in the national interest to be so dependent on the financial sector. In recent years all political parties have effectively signed up to an open borders, globalization agenda that appeared to enjoy sustained success and led to London displacing New York as the top global financial centre.