Premier Silvio Berlusconi said on Friday he would present a set of proposals for a global legal standard to prevent a recurrence of the economic crisis at next week's Group of Eight summit but ruled out their immediate adoption.
Berlusconi said the new ''codebook of rules for the future'' which Italy will present at the July 8-10 summit had been drafted by Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti.
The 'codebook' is 72 pages long and focuses on 12 main issues, the premier said, stressing that agreement was unlikely at the G8 which Italy is hosting in the quake-hit city of L'Aquila.
''We still have a long process ahead and will need many steps for further analysis'' of the issue, he told reporters in Rome.
Tremonti has said in the past he was confident of persuading the G8 to adopt the new standard - just as once there was a gold standard - to discipline world financial markets.
Berlusconi said last month that the summit at L'Aquila would be ''a G8 of rules'' but his remarks on Friday indicated that he was now convinced that more time was needed.
There have been hints that the United States may want to wait until the next meeting of the Group of 20 developing nations in Pittsburgh on September 24-25.
G8 finance ministers meeting in the southern city of Lecce last month approved the so-called Lecce Framework, a document of some 70 pages on the Legal Standard, which they said would be submitted to the G8 leaders at L'Aquila and ''the G20 and beyond''.
A final statement issued by the ministers said the objective of the strategy was to ''to create a comprehensive framework, building on existing initiatives, to identify and fill regulatory gaps and foster the broad international consensus needed for rapid implementation''.
Giampiero Massolo, Italy's pointman for the summit has hailed the fact that for the first time, at the G8 economic decisions will also be approved by the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa (the G5), as well as by Egypt.
The summit will also weigh exit strategies from the global economic emergency, Massolo said.
Bank of Italy Governor Mario Draghi, who heads the influential Financial Stability Board, said last month that world leaders should already be considering ways out of the crisis and looking at when to ease back on pump-priming moves such as deficit spending and interest rate cuts.
