Bush's final G-8 summit may be harmonious

Vladimir Putin, whose relationship with Bush was at times contentious, is no longer a head of state and is not expected to attend the session, even though his influence and authority remain in Russia in his new post as prime minister. Bush has said he looks forward to meeting Putin's hand-picked successor, President Dmitry Medvedev, on the sidelines of the summit.

For his part, Bush, now a lame-duck leader, says a top priority is urging summit partners to make good on prior pledges to help poor and developing nations address challenges from health care to education to corruption. "We need people who not only make promises but write checks," Bush said at a Rose Garden news conference on Wednesday previewing the summit.

The host, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda, faces his own domestic problems. His government has suffered from support ratings as low as 20 percent amid constant brinkmanship between ruling and opposition parties, including an unprecedented no-confidence vote for him in the upper house in June.

For Fukuda, who got to set most of the agenda for the gathering, the overriding issue is climate change. He would like to come out of the meeting with an agreement on 50 percent reductions in so-called greenhouse gases by 2050.

Bush said he supports efforts for the group to agree on long and short-term goals, with national plans to achieve them. But he also told reporters, "Look, we can't have an effective agreement unless China and India are a part of it. It's as simple as that. I'm going to remind our partners that's the case."

China and India are playing increasingly important roles in the world economy, raising fresh questions about the Group of Eight's relevancy as now constituted.

In 2001 at Bush's first meeting of the exclusive club, the members pretty much lived up to their billing as the world's leading industrial democracies.

No more. India, the world's most populous democracy, now has the world's fourth biggest economy, according to a World Bank rundown of the gross domestic product of countries based on purchasing power.

The U.S. remains the world's biggest economy, with Japan still at No. 2. But in third place now is China. Also, Brazil's economy is bigger than that of G-8 members Italy and Canada. In fact, the economies of Spain, Mexico and South Korea are bigger than that of G-8 laggard Canada, according to the World Bank report.

Bush spearheaded an effort to bring these and other fast-growing economies into the process, with a "major economies meeting" now scheduled for next Wednesday at the summit's conclusion.