Introduction

Abstract

In 2003 the international investment bank Goldman Sachs published a report describing what it claimed to be four future economic powers in the world. Two of these future powers were developing countries, Brazil and India, and they were lumped together with two former socialist (and for that reason not easily comparable to the others) countries, Russia and China, to form what became known as the BRIC countries.¹ The BRIC countries were predicted to advance rapidly, and by 2050 they were projected to have surpassed established major economic powers such as the UK, France, Germany and perhaps even Japan and the USA. This optimistic scenario was markedly different from what had earlier been predicted for developing countries. Only few years earlier, many observers had seen the advent of globalization as marking a serious threat to developing countries. Rather than economic advancement, these countries would risk economic marginalization, and the risk of marginalization was increased by the fact that those developmental state actions that in earlier times had brought prosperity to a few East Asian countries would no longer be feasible due to the new international rules governing globalization. The chances for economic progress for poor countries were indeed seen to be bleak.