Abstract
We discuss our recent partial confirmation of a conjecture of Deser and Schwimmer regarding the structure of "global conformal invariants". These are scalar quantites whose integrals over compacr manifolds remain invariant under conformal changes of the underlying metric. We also discuss the implications that the full conjecture would have regarding the notions of Q-curvature, and of the renormalized volume and conformal anomalies of conformally compact Einstein manifolds