Last weekend's Washington summit on tackling the world financial crisis did little to dent a looming economic slowdown, but offered developing countries such as China and India an important larger role, European and Asian observers said Monday.

Markets in Asia and Europe seemed sceptical about the results of the closely watched Group of 20 meeting in Washington, with major stock indexes mixed Monday on both continents, one sign that investors may have low expec-tations about its impact.

Leaders from 21 developed and emerging countries and four international organisations put off setting most concrete goals until an upcoming meeting in April, once the United States administration of President-elect Barack Obama has taken office.

Analysts said the summit failed to produce any coordinated stimulus measures to rescue the world economy from a downturn, and as such was not likely to prevent further market turbulence in coming weeks and months.

"At least it avoided the knee-jerk responses ... that would have made things worse," said Julian Jessop, chief international economist at London-based Capital Economics.

Mitul Kotecha, head of global foreign exchange strategy at French investment bank Calyon, said the summit conclusions "will not do much to prevent further market haemorrhaging over coming weeks as economic data continues to reveal a worsening picture."

European analysts said the main winners were developing econo-mies such as China and India, which have emerged from it wielding more influence in global decision making than they have until now.

China got a promise of a bigger role for developing countries in global finance - a long-time goal for Beijing. Its foreign ministry called the summit an "important and positive" step towards "the reform of the international financial structure".