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IQALUIT, Canada (Reuters) - The idea of a global tax on banks to recapture bailout costs gained ground on Saturday, boosted by the Obama administration's latest proposals, but there was no agreement on a specific design.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven rich nations called for closer study of a UK proposal for a bank levy to cover the cost of the bailouts of 2008 and 2009 that ran to hundreds of billions of dollars.

The ministers, meeting in a remote town in Canada's Far North, said any tax that result must be internationally coordinated and avoid choking off world economic recovery. Further details are unlikely to emerge for weeks.

The International Monetary Fund is compiling a report, due in April, on options for requiring banks to "make a fair and substantial contribution" toward bailouts. The IMF report was requested in September by the Group of 20 nations.

The G20, a more broadly based organization that is seen as supplanting the G7, will next meet in June in Toronto.

"It was generally agreed that the banks will have to pay for crisis costs," said German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble at the G7 meeting in tiny Iqaluit, Canada.

Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said officials agreed that financial institutions should "bear the costs of their contributions to those crises."

French Economy Minister Christine Lagarde said, "We were all in agreement that it had to be a universal taxation or universal levy or instrument to avoid the risk of arbitrage."