L'AQUILA, Italy (AP) — French President Nicolas Sarkozy called for a revamp of the global currency system, saying yesterday that the dollar's supremacy is outdated.

"We need to ask the question: shouldn't a world that is politically multi-polar correspond to a multi-monetary world economically?" he said in a news conference during a summit of world leaders in L'Aquila, Italy.

Sarkozy compared an overhaul of the global currency system to the enlargement of the Group of Eight structure to encompass fast-growing emerging economies, which were invited to join the Italian summit.

He said the supremacy of the dollar belongs to the post-Second World War era when America was the predominant world power both economically and politically.

"Even if it's a difficult topic, I hope that in the coming months we will talk about currencies and the international monetary system," he said. "There has to be a debate."

Leaders of rich and developing nations agreed not to resort to currency devaluation to gain a competitive advantage, but — with the absence of the Chinese President Hu Jintao, who returned home to deal with violence in western Xinjiang — the final statement didn't mention the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency.

"We will refrain from competitive devaluations of our currencies and promote a stable and well-functioning international monetary system," said the leaders of the G-8 industrialized nations, together with Brazil, China, India, Mexico, South Africa and Egypt.

One of the reasons often cited as to why the 1930s Great Depression lasted so long was that countries acted independently to protect their own interest by undermining their currencies. A cheaper currency boosts exports.

Christine Lagarde, France's finance minister, was particularly vocal earlier this year about how Britain was gaining an advantage by doing nothing to stem the sharp fall in the pound against the euro.

Though the dollar was not mentioned in the declaration, its future as the world's reserve currency is likely to remain a topic for debate over the coming months or years, as China, Russia and India have expressed their desire to see long-term changes in the international monetary system. But they have been careful to not push their desire for change too far — in case the dollar slumps and the value of their large dollar-denominated investments plummet.

China said its officials raised the issue in Italy at a working lunch yesterday, but British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he it was not on the formal agenda.

"There was not a serious discussion about this," Brown told reporters. "In this present situation as we're trying to get out of a deep recession, I don't want to give the impression that there's some major change about to happen round the corner that suggests that the present arrangements are destabilised."

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that the dollar was not brought up in bilateral talks on Thursday with US President Barack Obama and Brazil President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, despite a lengthy conversation on the economy.

"I think that despite whatever talk you might hear, I don't see that there's any movement away from the notion of the dollar being that currency," Gibbs told reporters.