It is now over 21 years since I first created the BRIC acronym, to show the potential for four large emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India and China – to achieve the growth that their populations could achieve ‘conceptually’. In subsequent years, along with colleagues at Goldman Sachs, we tried to specifically show what the world might look like if each of Brazil, Russia, India and China reached their full potential by 2050. We also did the same for many other countries around the world, both developed and developing – including the next tier down from the BRIC – which we called the ‘MINT’ (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey), and the ‘Next 11’ (N11, including Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam). I shall return to the themes of the political organisation of the BRICS, to assess their efforts to foster greater interdependence, the impacts of geopolitical tensions within the group and the question of the expansion of the membership of the BRICS grouping. But let me reflect first on an update of their economic performance and the global macroeconomic fundamentals in a bit more detail.
Photo by Maria Orlova