What G77 is and how it works

Where the group keeps its office

The address it publishes is a room in the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York, numbered S-0518. Behind that door there is no founding treaty, no charter, no headquarters agreement and no scale of assessments. The year's work falls to whichever member holds the chair, and the chair speaks for the rest: the statements issued through 2026 are headed on behalf of the Group of 77 and China, and delivered by the delegation of Uruguay, which holds the chairmanship for that year.

The chairmanship rotates between Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, and it runs for one year in every chapter at once. Until 1987 the term ran from the opening of a session of the General Assembly to its close, and the group moved it to the calendar year. Besides New York there are chapters at Geneva for UNCTAD, Nairobi for UNEP, Paris for UNESCO, Rome for the FAO and IFAD, Vienna for UNIDO, and the Group of 24 at Washington for the IMF and the World Bank. Arabic, English, French and Spanish are the working languages.

Why the name has not moved

The founding document was issued at the close of the first session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and it prints its signatories at the head of the text. The group's own account says the original name was retained for its historic significance as the membership grew, so the number in the title measures 15 June 1964 and nothing after it.

The declaration is not tidy about that number on its own page either. Its opening paragraph looks back to the joint declaration of the seventy-five countries made at the eighteenth session of the General Assembly, and calls the unity of the seventy-five the outstanding feature of the entire conference, a few lines below a heading that counts seventy-seven.

What the two membership lists show

The signatories of 1964 and the roster published now can be read against each other, and most of the differences are changes of name. Ceylon, Dahomey, Upper Volta, Burma, the United Arab Republic and the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar stand on the current list as Sri Lanka, Benin, Burkina Faso, Myanmar, Egypt and the United Republic of Tanzania. Two of the signatories are not states any longer: Yugoslavia, which chaired the group from 1985 to 1986, and the Republic of Viet-Nam.

Three signatories are states and are not on the list. Mexico chaired twice, from 1974 to 1975 and again from 1983 to 1984, and both terms are still printed on the group's own table of chairs. Cyprus acceded to the European Union on 1 May 2004. The Republic of Korea appears in the declaration and nowhere in the current roster. Nothing is published about any of the three departures. There is no procedure for leaving, no instrument to withdraw and no notice in the documents, so the roster is the only record of who is in it, and the copy this catalogue files carries the day it was read.

The group's own Washington chapter disagrees with it about one of those three. The Group of 24 was established in 1971 by the Group of 77 as a chapter of itself, formally created in 1972 to follow the international monetary institutions, and its published membership still names Mexico.

How a state becomes a member

No income threshold, no schedule of criteria, no instrument to sign: a state is a member when the group treats it as one, which is a different sort of fact from an accession date and is recorded in a different way. A treaty organisation can name the day a deposit was made. This group can name a list.

The system around it supplies no definition to borrow. The World Trade Organization states that there are no WTO definitions of developed and developing countries, and that members announce for themselves, subject to challenge by other members. The Statistics Division of the United Nations says of the M49 groupings that the assignment of countries to them is for statistical convenience and implies no political affiliation. So the roster carries states that other schemes file in very different places, and it settles none of that.

Every state seated in the African Union is on it but one, Western Sahara, which holds no United Nations membership. The rest of the list runs across Asia, the Americas and the Pacific, with Azerbaijan the single member this catalogue files under Europe.

The two members named apart

Palestine appears on the roster as the State of Palestine and holds no United Nations membership, which is the same condition that keeps Western Sahara off it. It held the chairmanship in 2019, in a caucus whose whole purpose is coordinating positions in a hall where it has no vote.

China is on the roster and is named separately from it in almost everything the group issues. The statements go out on behalf of the Group of 77 and China. The summit at Havana on 15 and 16 September 2023 was a summit of heads of state and government of the Group of 77 and China. In the Washington chapter the formulation is different again: the Group of 24 lists China as a special invitee and not as a member. No other member of this group is set apart in its own documents, and the group does not explain the practice anywhere it publishes.

What the group funds of its own

The Perez-Guerrero Trust Fund for South-South Cooperation is the money the group administers under its own name. It was established by General Assembly resolution 38/201 of 20 December 1983, out of the remaining balance of the United Nations Emergency Operation Trust Fund, and its grants are channelled through the United Nations Development Programme after the group approves them. Applications close on 30 April each year, and the maximum support for any one project in 2026 is 35,000 United States dollars. It is seed money for feasibility studies and for projects under the Caracas Programme of Action, and it is not a development bank.

The South Summit is the supreme decision-making body. It has met three times: at Havana from 10 to 14 April 2000, at Doha from 12 to 16 June 2005, and at Kampala on 21 and 22 January 2024. A separate summit of heads of state and government met at Santa Cruz de la Sierra on 14 and 15 June 2014 for the fiftieth anniversary of the declaration. Between summits the ministers for foreign affairs meet each year at the opening of the General Assembly, and what those meetings produce is a declaration, which is the instrument this group has instead of a treaty.