Abstract
This chapter begins with a brief history of the BRICS—from a purely analytical concept to the real-world political group with its own financial infrastructure. It then considers the role of the member countries in the global economy in terms of macro-indicators (territory, population and GDP), the production of a variety of key goods, trade and capital markets. Particular emphasis is placed on the rapid growth of the Chinese economy and the importance of its position in international commodity markets, the production of industrial goods as well as other economic spheres. As a result, BRICS countries contribute significantly to global GDP growth, and the contribution of China is particularly important.
Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.
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- 1.
Some analysts preferred not to include South Africa in the BRIC economic analysis, based on the relatively small scale of its economy (e.g. O’Neill 2012).
- 2.
For more detail on BRIC countries’ motivation to participate in the group, see Vasiliev et al. (2015).
- 3.
If 1996 is taken as the starting point, then in the subsequent period Russian growth was actually slightly faster than that seen in Brazil and South Africa, but still two to three times slower than in India and China.
- 4.
Data for 2016 are still unavailable.
- 5.
Data for 2015–2016 are still unavailable.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
This is the year-end record. By 1 August 2008, reserves amounted to 583 billion USD.
- 9.
According to the World Bank methodology, to calculate the GDP growth rate for an aggregate (such as the world economy as a whole), GDP growth rates in comparable prices are weighed against nominal GDP volumes calculated in USD by the 2010 exchange rate. We used this methodology to calculate average growth rates for BRICS as a group. With the use of GDP by PPP as weights, the role of BRICS would be significantly greater.
- 10.
The average rate of growth in global GDP was 2.8% both for 1991–2000 and for 2001–2016. It is shown in Fig. 21 by a horizontal broken line.
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Smirnov, S.V., Avdeeva, D.A. (2019). BRICS in the Global Economy. In: Smirnov, S., Ozyildirim, A., Picchetti, P. (eds) Business Cycles in BRICS. Societies and Political Orders in Transition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90017-9_2
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