BRICS

In one line

BRICS is the only one of MU's three organisations that is not an organisation: it has no treaty, no charter and no secretariat, and its two hard legal instruments are a bank and an emergency currency fund.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: BRICS is a grouping of major emerging economies which began as BRIC, an acronym coined in a Goldman Sachs research paper of 2001 for Brazil, Russia, India and China, was turned into a diplomatic forum with its first summit at Yekaterinburg in 2009, was joined by South Africa to become BRICS, and has been enlarged since 2024; it is founded on no treaty and has no permanent secretariat, working through annual summits and their declarations, but it has created two treaty institutions, the New Development Bank and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement, both established by agreements signed at the Fortaleza summit in 2014.

The origin: an acronym in a bank's research paper

BRICS is the only international grouping in this syllabus that began as a piece of investment research, and the fact is worth stating precisely because it explains everything that follows.

On 30 November 2001 Goldman Sachs published Global Economics Paper "Building Better Global Economic BRICs" by Jim O'Neill. Its argument, in the bank's own summary, was that in 2001 and 2002 real growth in the large emerging market economies would exceed that of the G7; that at the end of 2000 the combined output of Brazil, Russia, India and China was about 23.3 per cent of world output measured at purchasing power parity and about 8 per cent at current prices; that the weight of these four, and of China in particular, would grow over the following decade; and that in consequence world policy making forums should be reorganised.

The last of those propositions is the political programme of BRICS. The paper was not a call for the four to organise themselves; it was an argument that the existing institutions, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the G7, no longer reflected the distribution of economic weight. The countries named then adopted the argument, and the acronym, as their own.

From acronym to grouping

The summit series, from the BRICS joint information portal: Yekaterinburg 2009, Brasilia 2010, Sanya 2011, New Delhi 2012, Durban 2013, Fortaleza 2014, Ufa 2015, Goa 2016, Xiamen 2017, Johannesburg 2018, Brasilia 2019, Saint Petersburg 2020, New Delhi 2021, Beijing 2022, Johannesburg 2023, Kazan 2024, Rio de Janeiro 2025. The chair rotates and the host country holds the chairmanship for the year.