BRICS Countries: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Abstract

In 2001 Jim O’Neill, a British economist and chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management in London, coined the acronym BRIC in a Goldman Sachs research paper on global economics entitled ‘Building Better Global Economic BRICs’. In his paper he stressed the following facts: that in 2001 and 2002, real GDP growth in large emerging market economies would exceed that of the G7; and that at the end of 2000, GDP in US dollars on a PPP (purchasing power parity) basis in Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) was about 23.3 per cent of world GDP. Furthermore, on a current GDP basis, the BRICS countries’ share of world GDP was 8.0 per cent. Using current GDP as a standard measure, China’s GDP was larger than that of Italy. Within the next ten years (2001–2011), the combined weight of the BRICs and especially China in terms of world GDP would grow exponentially, raising important issues about the combined BRICs’ global economic impact in terms of fiscal and monetary policies. Moreover, given these, the world policymaking forums should be reorganized in such a way that the BRICs nations had representation in the G7.¹