Implementing the G20 Seoul Development and Employment Commitments: An Assessment

This study seeks to offer an assessment of the implementation of the development and employment commitments that were made at the G20 summit in Seoul on November 11-12, 2010. The Seoul Development Consensus (SDC) offered a new approach to the central and persistent problem of development. At Seoul, the leaders agreed on 25 clear, future-oriented, collective commitments. If these pioneering promises are to make a meaningful difference in the real world of development, G20 members must implement them.
This study assesses how much the G20 members have done so. Based on an analytic framework and methodology developed and applied by the G20 Research Group since 2008 and by its companion G8 Research Group since 1996, it first identifies and categorizes the specific development and employment commitments G20 leaders made at the Seoul Summit and specifies the method for assessing implementation. It then assesses for two periods the overall degree of implementation, by the G20 as a whole and by each of its individual members, of the development commitments, the development- employment commitments and the employment commitments. It goes on to assess how this implementation compares with that of the G20 in other commitments made at the Seoul Summit, and of the G20 summit commitments on development, employment and other subjects since the leaders’ first summit in Washington in 2008. Throughout this analysis the study draws on supporting case studies on India, Mexico and South Africa, commissioned for this purpose.