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On to Ontario, and then to Seoul, and France, and beyond. But what about Copenhagen? And Doha?
The G-20, as a forum for world leaders, is less than a year old. But in Pittsburgh, it confirmed itself as the central arbiter of the world's economy, supplanting and expanding the 20th-century-vintage grouping of the G-7.
That was an achievement in itself and enough to win the applause of the rising powers that account for an increasing share of the world economy.
"The most important G-20 meeting that we've had until now," said Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in a post-summit news conference.
"It's as if we were going up a ladder," he said, referring to the two previous meetings in the shadow of the financial crisis.
"Washington was the first step in that ladder. London -- there was skepticism that the G-20 would not produce anything and we managed to advance in an extraordinary way. And today I believe that the G-20 consolidated itself definitely as an institutional forum."
There was plenty of other self-congratulation as the unprecedented-for-Pittsburgh collection of world figures scattered across the globe.
"Because of the bold and coordinated action that we took, millions of jobs have been saved or created," President Obama said at his closing news conference. "The decline in output has been stopped; financial markets have come back to life; and we stopped the crisis from spreading further to the developing world."
The preamble to the leaders' summary statement reviews the nations' "forceful response, to pull the world economy out of its tailspin. Paragraph five is a two-word boast:
"It worked."
Looking forward to continued challenges, the leaders promised to build a framework for stability and prosperity, establish new rules to curb risky financial behavior, and broaden the makeup of other world financial institutions to reflect the wider world that the G-20 was formed to reflect.
They also said they would monitor one another's progress toward regulatory reform and economic balance for review at the sessions they scheduled next year in Canada and Korea and in France in 2011.
Mr. Lula da Silva, who in the days before the last G-20 summit in London, blamed the economic crisis on "the irrational behavior of people who were white and blue-eyed," struck a more collegial tone Friday as he praised one of the summit's more concrete decisions -- its promise to reform the governing bodies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to enhance the relative influence of developing countries such as Brazil.
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd also praised the G-20's emergence as the world's primary economic forum. He predicted that its call for peer review among nations would prove "a welcome discovery for us all."
"This is the first time the leaders have agreed, as it were, to peer review" of their actions and their nations' behavior, he said. "But you open yourself up to be, if not admonished, then commented on. It is one big stick."
Some experts weren't so sure.
"The real test of the G-20's effectiveness will lie in how it ensures implementation and accountability," said Daniel M. Price, who was the chief U.S. sherpa at the first G-20 leaders summit in the waning days of the Bush administration. "It is not clear as yet how that will work."
Speaking last week before the final summit communiqué had been issued but as its outline was already emerging, Nicholas R. Lardy, a scholar at the Peterson Institute of International Economics, also questioned that absence of sanctions for countries that stray from the growth consensus.
"It sounds like there [are] not going to be any sticks for countries that don't abide by these policies," he said. "Still, it's a step forward."
Despite the consensus reflected in the leaders' official and unofficial statements here, and their apparent gains in confronting the economic crisis in the short term, it remains to be seen whether this body will be more effective than its predecessors in surmounting several crucial challenges.
Later this year, 180 nations are scheduled to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark, to chart a renewed international response to climate change. After much talk of the green buildings and innovations that helped inspire the choice of Pittsburgh as the summit site, the communiqué raised more questions than answers on the path to agreement there.
"We will spare no effort to reach agreement in Copenhagen," the leaders affirmed. But the statement's muscular determination belied its lack of details on the issue. The leaders did agree on a new proposal to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, but they left to another day the questions of timetables or cost estimates on achieving that transition.
David Waskow, an advocate on climate issues with the anti-poverty group Oxfam, decried the meeting's results.
"With 72 days to Copenhagen, rich counties once again refused to put up he funds needed to deliver the deal in Copenhagen," he said in a statement. "Scrapping fossil fuel subsidies is a potentially welcome step, but it must not mean the poor paying for emissions cuts that should be the responsibility of the rich."
The leaders also declared their determination to avoid protectionism and resolve the long-stalled world trade negotiations, known as he Doha round, before the end of 2010. But they did so after months in which most of their nations had engaged in practices viewed as protectionist, in one way or another, by international trade bodies.
Mr. Price, the former U.S. sherpa who is now a partner with the law firm Sidley Austin, suggested that, on trade, the U.S. administration had entered the meeting under a cloud because of a recent decision to impose tariffs on Chinese tires.
"While the G-20's commitment to complete the Doha round by 2010 is a welcome signal of collective political will, it is still not clear if the new administration is prepared to spend the political capital necessary to see the Doha round through to completion," he said.
One key success for Mr. Obama's negotiators came on what Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner described as the chief U.S. priority, the need to erect a framework for "sustainable and balanced global growth."
That framework would counter the imbalances blamed for encouraging the bubble-and-bust cycle that battered the world over the last year.
Perceptions of those imbalances overlap among the world leaders, but they are not identical.
Mr. Geithner described the necessity of moving away from the excess consumption and borrowing that has characterized the American economy in recent years. To compensate for more prudent American spending polices, he reiterated the American view that the world's developing economic engines, specifically China, would have to spur their own consumer sectors and move away from a pattern of excessive saving.
In a statement issued at the summit, Chinese President Hu Jintao used language that echoed Mr. Geithner's call for reform, affirming the need for "sustainable and balanced world economic development."
The Chinese leader's statement acknowledged the need for changes in his nation's overreliance on western consumption, but it offered a different emphasis on the basis of longer term economic imbalances.
"The root cause [of unhealthy imbalance], however, is the yawning development gap between the North and the South," Mr. Hu said. "Only with real development of the vast developing world can there be solid global economic growth."
On the issue of reforming banks and other financial institutions, some nations, such as France, had called vociferously for caps on the bonus-based pay structures of banks, on the theory that they promoted risky behavior.
Others, notably the United States, said that the way to answer the problem of risk was to increase the capitalization standards for banks. In the communiqué, the leaders endorsed both concepts -- with strong language but without specific figures.
They committed themselves to developing new bank capital rules by the end of next year and implementing them by the end of 2012. On compensation, they called on the banking firms themselves to adopt limits on bonuses including provisions make sure that they are based on longer-term increases in values rather than short-term results.
That was apparently enough to satisfy French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who had threatened to walk out of the summit without a deal on the bonuses.
As they left Pittsburgh, the G-20 figures boasted of progress and promised more.
"I think we all recognize that we need to act before the memory of the crisis fades and before the impetus for reform recedes," Mr. Geithner said. "And we're trying to bring greater urgency and commitment to the need to act together."
Whether that sense of urgency can be maintained will go a long way to determining whether the G-20 [nations] will meet their promises of reform and prosperity, and whether or not this new and exclusive club will continue to perform its self-assigned function as the central forum of the world's economy.
"We will only achieve a full and sustainable recovery if we also tackle climate change and kick-start trade," Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, said in a statement at the close of Friday's session.
"This is a test of credibility for the G-20 ... I do not hide my concern at the slow rate of progress. Negotiations cannot be an open-ended process."
Politics Editor James O'Toole can be reached at
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or 412-263-1562.
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