BRIC economies

The BRIC grouping – Brazil, Russia, India and China – has become a shorthand for the rise of emerging markets in the global economy. And after a rather stellar decade (2000-2009), the BRICs mainly had a good crisis from which they are now rapidly exiting.

Jim O’Neill the chief economist for Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, coined the acronym in 2001.
Goldman Sachs reckons that China may well become the world’s largest economy before 2030.

Collectively, the BRIC economies could well surpass output in the Group of Seven wealthy nations – which have dominated the management of the global economy – by 2032.

The BRICs already have a bigger share of world trade than the US. China, probably the world’s biggest goods exporter last year, has been supplemented by India’s software and back-office exports, Russia’s oil and gas and the domination of a number of agricultural commodity markets by Brazil’s super-competitive farmers.