Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai said last week that Beijing hoped that the G20 members would make a joint effort to pursue macro-economic policies that will stabilize financial markets and restore confidence.

The summit, Cui said, should focus on critical issues in order to appropriately address such problems as inflation and the sovereign debt crisis in some developed countries.

Cui urged all G20 members to prevent protectionism and attend to the needs of the least developed economies.

"(The G20) should continue attaching importance to the problem of unbalanced development between the South and the North," Cui said.

He urged the group to objectively recognize the contributions of emerging economies and developing countries to world recovery and create a favorable environment for their growth.

The G20 was created in 1999 in response to the financial crises that plagued the emerging countries in the late 1990s.

Confronted with a global financial crisis, heads of state and the governments of G20 members met for the first time in Washington in November 2008. That was to work out an action plan to prevent the financial system and the global economy from collapsing.

Since then, leaders of the G20 have met regularly: in London in April 2009, Pittsburgh in September 2009, Toronto in June 2010, and Seoul in November 2010.

In the past three years, the G20 members have taken drastic steps to support the global economy. They have begun to address such problems as global macro-economic imbalances and the inadequacies of financial regulation.

The G20, which accounts for 85 percent of global output and two thirds of the world's population, has become the premier forum for world economic and financial cooperation.

The G20 members are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union.