These should be great days for the G20. It has held its first heads of government meeting in a non-western country, South Korea. There is perhaps no better role model to offer its high-level visitors a master-class in how to move from poverty to developed nation status in a generation.

The G20 was elevated to a heads of government meeting in 2008 by the then US President George W. Bush when the global financial system seemed to face imminent meltdown. The actions of its members, then and a few months later in London, who together represent more than 80 per cent of world gross domestic product, helped to save the world from plunging over the economic precipice.

So, the South Korean hosts envisaged their meeting as part victory lap, part consolidation of this earlier success through confirming new rules for banks, and part opportunity in the post-crisis calm to expand the discussions to longer-run global economic issues. They envisaged, for example, a discussion of development that moved away from aid volumes (that has anyway rather anomalously been left as a subject for the G8) and focused on lessons from South Korea’s own meteoric development. In their eyes this is much more about removing barriers to growth, such as poor infrastructure or weak education systems, than about the size of the aid input.