The Other Economic Summit

T.O.E.S. stands for The Other Economic Summit. It emerged for the first time in London, meeting parallel to the G7 summit in 1984 - with a diverse group of alternative economists, greens, community activists making the point that there were other ways of going about things, and challenging the G7 leader's right to speak for the world.

Since then TOES has become an umbrella term, travelling around the world meeting - in some form or other, even if its just as a press office - parallel to the G7 summit.

So there was a TOES in Tokyo in 1985 which was really exported from the UK, and got themselves involved in the dispute about whether there should be a new airport.

The only year missed so far was Italy in 1986. Since then, TOES in the UK became the New Economics Foundation, and there have been alliances of organisations pulling together a series of events for each summit, at which TOES has had a presence.

Last year in Naples, the whole range of events rose up a notch in importance because the communist mayor of Naples insisted on having a parallel reception for the alternative summit as he had done for the G7 leaders - a number of mural artists were also arrested for their caricatures of Bill Clinton!