Germany failed to secure harder commitments from Wednesday's G8 meeting on a post-crisis 'exit strategy' for cutting public deficits, but the issue is sure to return to haunt leaders in the months ahead.

Chancellor Angela Merkel made little of the matter in public but one official said she would make dealing with the cost of the huge stimulus committed since last year a "big issue" at a G20 summit in the US in late September.

Doing so is easier for the Germans, now reporting signs that the economy is emerging from recession and little touched by the banking and real estate calamities that have hounded policymakers in Britain and the US.

For now, the consensus for most of the rest is to stay the course with vast injections of government money until the economy can cope without life support, and only thereafter turn to repairing the damage to public finances.

Government deficits are forecast by the IMF to double this year to around seven per cent of GDP for advanced economies, and nerves about bond markets and a possible ballooning of the cost of funding deficits mean action will eventually be needed. Co-ordinating recovery efforts, however, remains a challenge for the G8 industrial powers, as well as between them and the large emerging market economies such as China and India, also in Italy for a three-day summit.

"There are still differences over the issue in the G8," said Andrei Bokarev, a Russian official involved in the summit. "Some states believe it is too early for exit strategies."

All the leaders managed to agree on, said Carl Weinberg of High Frequency Economics, is that the economy is in a mess.

"Response to the economic crisis will apparently be left for each nation to address in a manner appropriate to its own individual circumstances," he said in a commentary after the first day of a three-day meeting in L'Aquila.

L'Aquila was considered by at least some of those attending as a pitstop between two bigger G20 summits, one that produced a battle plan for economic revival last April in London and a follow-up scheduled for Pittsburgh in late September.

Maplecroft, a risk consultancy, says Japan and Italy top its list of the world's least fiscally sustainable countries and will come under intense pressure in future years even if the G8 commits to sustainable fiscal positions in the medium term.