BRICS : 2018 Summit

The 2018 BRICS summit was the tenth annual BRICS summit, an international relations conference attended by the heads of state or heads of government of the five member states Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. 

• The summit was held 25–27 July 2018 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the second time the South Africa has hosted the summit after the 2013 summit.

 Brazil    Russia  

 India  

 China  

 South Africa

China's President Xi Jinping, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, President Cyril Ramaphosa, Brazil's President Michel Temer and Russia's President Vladimir Putin pose for a group picture at the BRICS summit meeting in Sandton on July 26, 2018. 

2016 BRICS projected GDP growth

The BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. As of 2015, the five BRICS countries represent over 3 billion people, or 42% of the world population; have a combined nominal GDP of US$16.039 trillion, equivalent to approximately 20% of the gross world product, and an estimated US$4 trillion in combined foreign reserves.

2016 BRICS projected GDP growth.

• India: 7.6%
• China: 6.4%
• South Africa: 1.6%
• Russia: -0.3%
• Brazil: -1.9%

BRICS 2017 : (L-R) Brazil's President Michel Temer, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, South Africa's President Jacob Zuma and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pose for a group photo during the BRICS Summit at the Xiamen International Conference and Exhibition Center in the Fujian province  (4 September 2017)

BRICS launch New Development Bank (NDB)

The BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

•  20 percent of the global GDP 

Since its first summit in 2009, the group has struggled to institutionalize its otherwise incoherent grouping, which is often at loggerheads politically and is too geographically disparate for a security framework to be viable. It even has discordant views on how to manage trade, which has precluded a trade partnership from materializing.

(7/2014) World's emerging economies launch rivals to the World Bank and IMF: $100 billion development bank, to be headquartered in Shanghai, and a currency reserve of the same size, institutions that aim to be both competitor and antithesis to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The New Development Bank (NDB), announced at the sixth BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil, has been billed as an answer to decades of grievances in the developing world about a global financial architecture that critics say the United States and Western Europe have exploited to enforce the subservience of the developing world.

Though at first the NDB will bankroll badly needed infrastructure projects in the BRICS nations, other countries will be permitted to buy in and apply for funding.

Despite the ambitious rhetoric of BRICS officials, their projects are not the first of their kind, nor will they compete with the 66 years of development experience under the World Bank’s belt or with the liquidity of the $755 billion IMF. Most economists describe the BRICS bank as complementary, rather than a rival, to the World Bank — in fact, the World Bank president himself has welcomed the BRICS’ venture as a means of filling the vast funding gaps in rapidly developing countries.

In contrast to the World Bank, the NDB will begin as an egalitarian venture among the BRICS, with each founding nation contributing $10 billion (before the bank’s value is doubled at some point) and holding equal voting power. Even though China's economy is larger than that of the other four members combined, the country has agreed to hold an equal stake in the bank — a sticking point for India that has delayed an agreement for two years.

China will hold a larger stake only in the currency reserve, which is a sort of emergency fund, like the IMF, that is meant to protect BRICS nations from another global crisis.

2014 : sixth BRICS summit in Fortaleza, Brazil

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.

MINT economies

Jim O'Neill, the former Goldman Sachs economist who coined the term BRIC to refer to the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China began to talk up the prospects of another group of emerging nations in November 2013.

He wrote that the MINT economies of Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey all had favourable demographics and interesting economic prospects, the same criteria he had accurately used to predict future growth of the Bric economies.

MINT economies in the news
In November 2013 the FT's Beyond BRICs emerging markets hub considered prospects for the MINT economies and examined where investors were actually putting their money. EPFR data showed that MINT economies had attracted $17.1bn against $141.73bn invested in BRIC economies.

Also in November 2013 an FT writer referred to the new MINT grouping as a means of illustrating how important Africa had become.