G20 declarations, and their linguistic evolution
A look at the leaders’ declaration documents of all G20 summits held till date
Since 2008, when first ever summit was held in Washington DC for the leaders of the Group of Twenty (G20), the premier forum has met 17 times. As India’s first-ever G20 presidency kicks off with a grand summit in Delhi, HT looks at the leaders’ declaration documents of all the summits held till date.
17 summits, 17 declarations: The heads of state of G20, which came into being in 1999 as a forum for finance ministers and central bank governors, met for the first time in 2008. Since then, there have been 17 summits, with Delhi being the 18th. All summits have concluded with a leaders’ declaration statement which briefs the press on the outcomes of the summit. Two years, 2009 and 2010, had two summits in a year.
1,02,162 words feature in all the declarations put together
Overall, a gathering of economies
Word clouds are graphical representations that the depict the frequency of word usage in a given text – giving greater prominence to words that appear more frequently. The word cloud here is generated from all G20 declarations till date. The larger a word appears here, the more frequently it has appeared in the text.
Given that G20 started off as a forum of economic cooperation, it is not surprising that economic terms dominate the overall language of all declarations till date. The word “financial” has been used most – appearing nearly 600 times in total. It is followed by the terms, “growth”, “support”, “development”, and “sustainable” making the top 5.
UnderstaA shift in focus, post-pandemic
A word cloud generated from the declarations post 2000, however, shows how the global focus has shifted drastically. The term “support” takes the top spot in frequency of appearance jumping from the third spot in the overall list. “Sustainable”, meanwhile, jumps from the 5th spot to 2nd. Financial lands on the third spot.
But it is the new entrants that highlight the salient change in theme of the text in the aftermath of a global pandemic – from an economic bias to leaning towards social factors. Among the top 10 most used words, 5 weren’t in the overall list – “food” at #4, “health” at #5, “efforts” at #7, “energy” at #8 and “digital” at #9.
Getting verbose
Going by size, the G20 declaration has grown longer over the years. The first ever declaration had more than 3,500 words. The latest one which was held in Bali last year, had 10,411 words. On average, the G20 leaders’ summit document has a little more than 6000 words. The shortest one was from the 2010 South Korean summit, with just 1,550 words.
“India’s G20 Presidency has been the most ambitious in the history of G-20. With 112 outcomes and presidency documents, we have more than doubled the substantive work from previous presidencies," PM Modi said. Consensus among the members has been difficult to achieve as the member countries are divided over Russia's war in Ukraine.
India’s G20 Presidency has been the most ambitious in the history of G-20. 73 outcomes (lines of effort) and 39 annexed documents (presidency documents, not including Working Group outcome documents).