COLUMN RIGHT/ MARTIN FELDSTEIN / KATHLEEN FELDSTEIN : Why Not G15? After All, It’s Only Symbolic : Despite global platitudes, countries will continue to manage their economies locally.

President Clinton will be in Tokyo next week to attend his first meeting of the Economic Summit, the annual gathering of the leaders of the G7 group of countries. There will be several new faces, since there have been changes of government in Canada and Italy as well as in the United States in the last year. Although the Tokyo summit will be a major media event around the world, experience over the nearly 20 years of summit meetings suggests that little will be accomplished beyond the opportunity for the new leaders to become slightly better acquainted.

We can’t help wondering whether the G7 group hasn’t outlived its usefulness. The group includes only the United States and Canada from the Western Hemisphere, Japan as the sole representative of all Asia and just four of the more than 20 countries of Europe. There will be a cameo appearance by Boris Yeltsin, as there was by Gorbachev in the past. But it is hard to argue that this particular grouping of nations is the one that best represents the realities of today’s world economy.

Why is China, with its almost 1.2 billion people, not represented, while Canada, with fewer than 30 million, is? And why Italy rather than Spain or Sweden or the Netherlands? And why should Russia be the only representative of the former Soviet bloc?

Apart from the question of membership, what do the economic summit meetings achieve? The 1993 Tokyo Summit is bound to put out the usual communique that promises cooperation among the G7 countries to promote international trade and to foster economic growth with low inflation. Protocol dictates such standard platitudes despite the fact that the individual countries will continue to manage their economies in accordance with their own domestic goals for employment and inflation.

If anyone doubts that, think who in Washington would argue that the Clinton budget cuts should be either larger or smaller to help restore growth in Japan or Germany? Or ask why Germany continues to ignore the prodding of its European neighbors and the U.S. to lower interest rates. The answer clearly is that German economic policy is dominated by its desire to bring domestic inflation down even at the cost of higher interest rates.

In fact, coordinating economic policy is essentially irrelevant because additional growth in any of the three economic areas has little impact on the other two. If the U.S. economy grows by 4% rather than 2% over the next year, U.S. imports might rise by somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 billion. The share of those imports coming from Japan, Canada and Europe would not be enough to make a difference in the growth cycles of those countries.

But the U.S. and Germany will nevertheless be asked to stimulate domestic demand by the leaders of the other countries who are eager for a communique that promises some action for faster world growth. And Clinton is likely to repeat the urgings of Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen that Japan should have a larger fiscal expansion to help its trading partners. This is indeed strange advice since Japan, with an economy half the size of ours, has recently enacted fiscal stimulus measures that are seven times larger than the original Clinton stimulus proposal.

It is already quite likely that Japan will have the strongest growth in 1994 of all the major industrial countries. But even if growth in Japan jumped by an extra 2%--or an additional $60 billion of spending--that would only mean an extra $2 billion or $3 billion of added imports from the United States.

The closest thing to serious business at the Tokyo summit will be a discussion of world trade agreements, in particular how to revive the stalled negotiations on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. The French have stubbornly continued to insist on providing high agricultural subsidies to their farmers. While the Tokyo summit is hardly the place for detailed negotiations, the personal commitments of these world leaders would help to eliminate the outstanding roadblocks to an agreement.

Whatever its original purpose, the G7 meetings have come to represent symbolism rather than substance. So why not enlarge the group on alternate years to include more Asian and European countries, to include representatives from Latin America and to broaden representation from the former Soviet bloc? It would be a gesture of world leadership for Clinton or Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa to make such a proposal. And it would be an acknowledgment that a new world order has indeed arrived.