On June 11, 2021, 7 heads of state arrived in the United Kingdom for the G7 summit held in Cornwall. 7 attending nations for the first round of the summit are the United Kingdom as the host nation, the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Along with the 7 heads of state (Prime Minister Boris Johnson, President Joe Biden, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, President Emmanuel Macron, Chancellor Angela Merkel, Prime Minister Mario Draghi, and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga), European Union will be represented by commission President Ursula von der Leyen and council President Charles Michel. In the latter stages of the G7 summit, 3 nations – India, South Korea, and Australia – and the UN will be welcomed into the group as the guests of the host nation. On the first day after the leaders took their group picture, discussions over vaccine donations were held with G7 agreeing upon the promise to deliver 1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries around the world, with the United States taking on 500 million doses. Given the Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s remark over building the economy and the health back better, “We need to make sure that we now allow our economies to recover… We need to make sure that when we recover, we level up and we build back better. We have a huge opportunity to do that as G7,” G7 is now set to tackle the topics of climate change, economic recovery, COVID-19, and the threat of China. On the second day of the event, representatives of G7 discussed the issues of the rapid infrastructure plan named Build Back Better World (B3W) initiative by the United States to rival the economic and military surge by China. While the plan still requires plenty of modifications and allocations, a senior Biden camp official claimed, “This is not just about confronting or taking on China… But until now we haven’t offered a positive alternative that reflects our values, our standards and our way of doing business.” With G7 agreeing upon the infrastructure plan, the United States also introduced the matter of human rights violations by China, resulting in G7 agreeing to compete against China economically, but the actions against China held great division in opinions. While the official statement by G7 is yet to be released, it is said to have included China for the first time since three years ago according to an official who claims, “There was commitment to take action in response to what we’re seeing.” With the summit coming to its resolution, the minimum global corporate taxation was agreed upon during the finance ministers and central bank governors G7 with the communique brought on June 5 to notify the agreement. While the agreement is not all set and done, requiring further discourse between nations and agreement at the July 2021 meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, wide-ranging countries including South Africa and Mexico have already endorsed the plan of a minimum global tax rate of at least 15%. Five ministers who were in the G7 finance ministers and central bank governors wrote, “This year, nations have a historic opportunity to end the race to the bottom in corporate taxation, restoring government resources at a time when they are most needed… To pave the way to that goal, we endorse an initial understanding that the global minimum tax rate must be at least 15 percent, as agreed upon by the Group of Seven countries last week,” to indicate their confidence in the plan.
The Liberal Conservative 