Thirty-three years after the French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing invited fellow world leaders to Rambouillet to discuss the west's economic crisis, the G8 will be working to a similar agenda when it meets in Japan. Harold Wilson was prime minister when the G6 - as it then was - met in the midst of a global downturn prompted by the fourfold increase in the price of oil triggered by the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Gordon Brown will attend his first summit as prime minister against a backdrop of crude closing in on $150 a barrel and developed economies facing a mild dose of the economic disease that afflicted the 1970s: stagflation. The main topics that will dominate the summit are: World economy Last year's summit took place before the onset of the global credit crunch, caused initially by badly performing sub-prime mortgages in...
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