IB Geography 4.1.3 Powerful Organizations and Global Groups Notes

Membership Decides Whose Interests a Global Group Defends

1. The G20 has nineteen member countries plus two regional bodies, the European Union and, since 2023, the African Union, and its governance rests on practice rather than treaty.
2. The G20's South African presidency site puts its members at 85 percent of world GDP, 75 percent of international trade and two thirds of world population.
3. The G7 has seven, all of them high income economies, with the European Union also at the table.

1. The OECD has 38 members concentrated in Europe, North America and the richer Pacific economies, while OPEC has eleven after the United Arab Emirates left on 1 May 2026.

1. The IMF has 191 members, very nearly every state on Earth, and the New Development Bank has ten.
2. Membership, chair, vote basis and what a body can compel are the four questions that separate these six organizations, and they are what higher level answers on global power turn on.

The G7 Has No Charter, and Its Membership Changed by Decision Twice

1. Six countries met at Rambouillet in France in 1975, Canada joined at San Juan in 1976 and the European Community began taking part in 1977.
2. Russia met the group from 1994 as the political eight, and the 1998 Birmingham summit gave Russia full participation and created the G8.
3. Meeting at The Hague on 24 March 2014, weeks after Russia annexed Crimea, the other seven leaders declared that they would suspend their participation in the G8 until Russia changed course.
4. The group has been the G7 ever since, so its membership shrank without any treaty being amended or any court being involved.

1. The G7 has no charter, no headquarters and no permanent secretariat, and a one year presidency rotates among the seven, which France used to host the 2026 summit at Evian from 15 to 17 June 2026.
2. Brazil, South Korea, Egypt, India and Kenya attended Evian as guests of the host, because the chairing country writes the invitation list.

The Cap on Russian Crude Shows What a Declaration Can Reach

1. On 2 December 2022 the G7, the European Union and Australia announced a cap of 60 US dollars a barrel on seaborne crude oil of Russian origin, to apply from 5 December 2022.
2. That announcement created no law anywhere, because a G7 statement carries no legal force until each government writes the cap into its own sanctions rules.
3. The cap bites because shipping insurance and maritime services for this trade are concentrated in G7 jurisdictions, so a buyer paying above the cap loses access to them.
4. The European Union and the United Kingdom cut the cap to 47.60 US dollars from 3 September 2025 and to 44.10 from 1 February 2026, so the level moves while the mechanism stays the same.

The G20 Added a Continent to Its Table and Still Binds Nobody

1. The African Union was admitted as a member in 2023, bringing 55 African states inside a body that had counted only South Africa from the continent.
2. Like the G7 the G20 has no permanent secretariat, and the presidency is supported instead by a troika of the previous, current and incoming chairs.

1. South Africa held the 2025 presidency and hosted the Johannesburg summit on 22 and 23 November 2025, the first G20 summit held on the African continent.
2. The United States boycotted that summit and had demanded that no declaration be issued at all.
3. A leaders' declaration was agreed anyway, committing the group to strengthen the common framework for debt treatments, though no penalty follows for a member that ignores it.

Membership and the Invitation List Are Two Different Things

1. The United States took the presidency for 2026 and set the summit for 14 and 15 December 2026 at Doral in Miami.
2. On 26 November 2025 President Trump said that South Africa would not be invited to it.
3. President Ramaphosa replied on 1 December 2025 that South Africa is and will remain a full, active, and constructive member of the G20.
4. Both statements can hold at once, because membership rests on the group's own practice while the invitation list belongs to whichever country is chairing.
5. Admission works the same way, since the African Union came in by agreement among leaders at the 2023 summit, with no vote and no ratification anywhere.

The OECD Writes Rules It Cannot Enforce, and Most Countries Sit Outside

1. The convention creating the OECD was signed on 14 December 1960, and Costa Rica became its thirty eighth member on 25 May 2021 and no country has joined since.
2. Only four Latin American countries are members, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica, and no African country is one.

1. Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Peru and Romania opened accession talks in 2022, Indonesia received its roadmap in 2024 and Thailand began the same year.
2. Council decisions are taken by unanimity among those voting, one vote per member, so a member that dislikes a decision can abstain rather than block it and is then not bound by it.

The OECD Drafts and Counts, Then Waits for Governments to Act

1. The OECD hosts the Inclusive Framework on base erosion and profit shifting, a body far wider than the OECD itself.
2. The OECD states that over 135 jurisdictions joined the plan agreed in October 2021, and that over 145 countries and jurisdictions agreed the way forward on the package in December 2025.
3. At the centre of it is a minimum effective corporate tax rate of 15 percent on large multinational groups, and every jurisdiction that wants it must pass its own legislation to give the model rules effect.
4. The December 2025 agreement runs the rules side by side with United States tax law, leaving US headquartered groups outside the OECD rules, which shows a drafting body accommodating a member it cannot bind.
5. Its Development Assistance Committee does comparable work on aid, counting what its 34 members and associates give, publishing the figures every April, and holding no power to stop any member cutting its own budget.
6. The preliminary figure for 2025 was 174.3 billion US dollars, 0.26 percent of their combined gross national income and 23.1 percent lower in real terms than 2024, the largest annual drop the OECD has recorded in official development assistance.

OPEC Agrees Production Levels, and the Market Sets the Price

1. OPEC was founded at a conference in Baghdad in September 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.
2. Its ministers agree production levels for member countries, and each government then instructs its own state company or licensees.
3. No OPEC decision sets the price of a barrel, because price is settled in traded markets where OPEC output is one supply among many.
4. OPEC influences the price by changing expected supply, which is a different thing from setting it.
5. Angola announced its exit in December 2023, effective on 1 January 2024, saying the production quota scheme held its output down.
6. The United Arab Emirates announced its exit on 28 April 2026, effective 1 May 2026 after 59 years, saying the decision followed a review of its production policy and capacity and rested on national interest.
7. Eleven members remain, Algeria, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Reserves Sit Underground While Production and Exports Move

1. OPEC's Annual Statistical Bulletin, published on 29 April 2026, reports world proven crude oil reserves of 1,572 billion barrels at the end of 2025.
2. OPEC member countries held 1,243 billion barrels of that, about 79 percent of the world total, counted on the twelve-member roll the bulletin used two days before the United Arab Emirates left.
3. Reserves are a stock, a quantity sitting underground and measured at a single date.
4. The same bulletin puts total world crude oil production for 2025 at 74.85 million barrels a day, which is a flow measured across a year.
5. The same bulletin puts OPEC members' own crude output at 27.45 million barrels a day in 2025, about 37 percent of world crude production and less than half their share of world reserves.
6. OPEC members exported an average of 19.85 million barrels of crude a day in 2025, and 14.79 million of those went to Asia.
7. World oil demand averaged 105.15 million barrels a day in 2025, a larger figure again because it counts all liquid fuels rather than crude alone.

OPEC+ Widened the Group and Narrowed the Decision Circle

1. From December 2016 OPEC has coordinated with non member producers under a Declaration of Cooperation, known informally as OPEC+.
2. Those non members include Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Oman, Bahrain, Brunei, Malaysia, Mexico, Sudan and South Sudan, with Brazil inside the wider Charter of Cooperation but taking no part in the production adjustments.
3. OPEC's monthly oil market report for August 2026 put crude production by the countries taking part in that declaration at about 37.66 million barrels a day in July 2026.
4. The live decisions come from a much smaller circle, and on 3 May 2026 seven of the participating countries, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria and Oman, agreed an increase of 188,000 barrels a day from June 2026 with the United Arab Emirates having stepped away.

October 2022: A Two Million Barrel Cut Followed by a Falling Price

1. At its ministerial meeting in Vienna on 5 October 2022, OPEC+ decided that participating countries would reduce overall production by 2 million barrels a day from November 2022.
2. The baseline was August 2022 production levels, so the headline figure was a cut to required production levels rather than to what was coming out of the ground.
3. The International Energy Agency's report that month put the real effect at about 1 million barrels a day, because most members were already producing well below their ceilings.
4. Brent crude averaged 93.72 US dollars a barrel in October 2022, 90.94 in November and 81.50 in December on the International Monetary Fund's commodity price series.
5. The price fell over the two months after the cut was announced, while other things moved in the same weeks, including the G7 cap on seaborne Russian crude that took effect on 5 December 2022.

The IMF Weights Its Votes, so One Member Can Block a Quota Change

1. The International Monetary Fund has 191 members, Liechtenstein having joined as the 191st on 21 October 2024.
2. Every member is assigned a quota in Special Drawing Rights, which fixes what it must contribute, how much it may borrow, its share of any allocation and its voting power.
3. The quota formula weights economic size at 50 percent, openness at 30, variability of receipts at 15 and official reserves at 5.
4. Inside the size term the Fund blends 60 percent market exchange rate GDP with 40 percent GDP at purchasing power parity, and a compression factor of 0.95 then narrows the spread between large and small members.
5. Voting power is a different number from quota share, because every member holds an equal share of the basic votes that together make up 5.502 percent of all votes, then adds one vote for every SDR 100,000 of quota.

The 85 Percent Threshold Turns 16.5 Percent Into a Veto

1. The Articles of Agreement reserve certain decisions for a special majority of 85 percent of total voting power.
2. Adjusting quotas sits under that threshold, and so does any amendment of the Articles themselves.
3. A decision needing 85 percent can be stopped by anyone holding more than 15 percent, since the opposition only has to keep the majority below the line.
4. The United States is the only member above that line, so no reallocation of quotas can happen without it agreeing to the change.

A Quota Increase Agreed in 2023 Has Still Not Taken Effect

1. On 18 December 2023 the Board of Governors approved a 50 percent increase in quotas worth SDR 238.6 billion, lifting the total from about SDR 477 billion to SDR 715.7 billion.
2. The increase is equiproportional, so every member's quota rises by the same percentage and nobody's share of the total moves at all.
3. An agreed increase takes effect only once enough members formally consent and pay, and those consents have come in slowly.
4. The Executive Board extended the consent period again on 8 May 2026, this time to 15 November 2026, almost three years after the decision was taken.

Conditionality Is the Mechanism, and It Needs a Named Programme

1. The Fund's own account of conditionality is that a government borrowing from it agrees to adjust its economic policies to overcome the problems that led it to seek help.
2. Those commitments include prior actions taken before any money moves, quantitative performance criteria that are numerical targets the country must meet, and structural benchmarks covering reforms that cannot easily be given a number.
3. Money arrives in tranches released after periodic reviews by the Executive Board, which can grant a waiver when a target is missed but the programme still looks likely to work.
4. Argentina shows the machinery running, with an arrangement approved on 11 April 2025 for 20 billion US dollars over 48 months, a sum equal to 479 percent of its quota, of which 12 billion was disbursed at once.

The New Development Bank Gave Its Five Founders an Equal Share Each

1. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa signed the founding agreement at Fortaleza in Brazil on 15 July 2014.
2. The treaty entered into force the following July, and the bank works from headquarters in Shanghai.
3. Article 2 sets an initial subscribed capital of 50 billion US dollars against an authorized capital of 100 billion, and states that the subscribed capital shall be equally distributed amongst the founding members.
4. Article 6 makes each member's voting power equal to the shares it has subscribed.
5. Article 8 forbids any change that would push the founders' combined voting power below 55 percent or let a single non founding member exceed 7 percent.
6. The shareholding table revised on 25 June 2026 gives each founder 100,000 shares and 18.72 percent of the votes, against 2.24 percent for Egypt, 1.76 for Bangladesh, 1.15 for Algeria, 1.04 for the United Arab Emirates and 0.23 for Uzbekistan.
7. That leaves the five founders holding 93.6 percent between them, so the 55 percent floor in the treaty is nowhere near being tested.

Ten Members, and What the Bank Has Actually Lent

1. Bangladesh joined in September 2021, the United Arab Emirates in October 2021, Egypt in February 2023, Algeria in May 2025 and Uzbekistan in June 2026.
2. Colombia, Uruguay, Ethiopia, Angola and Zimbabwe have been admitted by the Board of Governors and stay prospective members until each deposits its instrument of accession.
3. The bank reports 139 approved projects worth 42.9 billion US dollars, converted at exchange rates as of 31 December 2025.
4. Its investor material for mid 2025 splits the portfolio by borrower, with India and China on 26 percent each, South Africa on 19, Brazil on 17 and Russia on 11.
5. Part of the lending is issued in members' own currencies rather than dollars, which spares a borrower some exchange rate risk on repayment.

None of These Bodies Legislates, so Each Compels in Its Own Way

1. The G7 and the G20 produce declarations, and an obligation appears only when a member writes one into its own national law.
2. The OECD produces model rules and published statistics, and an obligation appears only when a jurisdiction legislates those rules for itself.
3. OPEC and OPEC+ agree production levels among members, and each state applies them through its own ministry or state company.
4. The IMF lends under an arrangement whose conditions bind the borrower because the money stops if they are missed, and the New Development Bank lends under loan agreements that are contracts.
5. Only those last two have any legal hold, each only over a country that has asked it for money, which is the distinction Higher Level answers on global power are expected to draw.

What a Body Can Withhold Is the Part You Can Check

1. Calling a body powerful describes an impression, whereas stating what it is able to withhold describes a mechanism.
2. The G7 can withhold shipping insurance, OPEC members can withhold barrels, and the two lending institutions can withhold a disbursement.
3. Each of those can be checked against a dated document, which is what separates a claim about power from an impression of it.