PARIS - THE Group of Eight (G-8) industrialised powers, ineffectual in the face of the worldwide finance crisis, is slowly losing its grip on the global economy and now faces calls for its abolition.

The G-8 - Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States - has done little more than issue statements of principle since the start of the crisis last September, leaving the heavy-lifting to the broader Group of 20 (G-20).

It was the G-20, which in addition to the G-8 includes such emerging market powerhouses such as Argentina, Brazil, China, India and South Africa, that confronted the crisis head on at an April summit in London.

'As far as we can tell, no substantive results have come out of the G-7, G-8 meetings for many years,' said Dr Richard Portes, a researcher at the London School of Economics. 'It cannot deal with the environment, trade, international finance without bringing in China, India, Brazil or South Africa.'

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also questioned the G-8 format. 'The problems we are confronting can no longer be resolved by the industrialised countries alone,' she said last week.

One of the relatively few remaining defenders of the G-8, Mr John Kirton of the University of Toronto, has argued that the group does have 'an essential role to play.'

'The G-20 summit basically followed the principles and guidelines set down first by the G-7 and G-8,' he said.

But most international affairs experts believe the G-8's days are numbered. 'If they want the G-20 to survive and to be functional, the two (G-8 and G-20) cannot stay together,' maintained Mr Rajiv Kumar of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations.

His position was echoed by Mr Charles Wyplosz of the Institut de Hautes Etudes Internationales in Geneva.

At Cornell University in the United States, Mr Eswar Prasad said 'the G-20 is increasingly taking the role as the agenda-setting body for the world.'

But Mr Prasad also acknowledged that the G-20, which rose to prominence in response to the finance crisis, might not survive the return of better times 'because there are some very big tensions inside the G-20' among emerging and developed nations on the question of (economic) regulation. -- AP