I'll be frank, every article that presents BRICS as a real thing is propaganda. It isn't a coincidence that we're seeing a lot more of them since Russia invaded Ukraine.
India and China are enemies, they keep having border skirmishes. South Africa is a failed state and it has negligible influence on the world stage. Brazil is one of the reasons why the term "middle-income trap" was devised.
BRICS members don't even vote in each other's favor in the UN. Russia has received zero meaningful assistance from them during the war in Ukraine.
It's entirely possible that in the future a real anti-western bloc will emerge. But it isn't BRICS.
The connection between the subcontinent and Russia is longstanding. Socialism was foundational to the post-independence government organization of both India and Bangladesh. My mom grew up reading Russian literature that has been translated into Bangla. Both India and Bangladesh abstained from a UN vote that called for Russia to remove troops from Ukraine: https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-explains-why...
As to China, it is all over India and Bangladesh, loaning money for infrastructure projects, etc. China is building the new subway in Dhaka: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/1256874.shtml. I had hoped for more alignment of India and Bangladesh with the Anglosphere after the fall of the Soviet Union, but things have absolutely gone in the opposite direction. Russia, China, and India are an almost complete alternative to the west. There is very little that can’t be handled using home grown solutions in one of those three countries, and that list is getting shorter daily.
There is no expectation that every country in the world cease buying Russian fuels, that's why the price cap was put in place. And India is abiding the price cap. The hysteria about developing countries buying Russian oil/gas is mostly from the media, but so long as Russia is barely hitting breakeven prices then there is little reason for Western governments to care where India or others get their energy from.
Europe is cutting their dependence because it was/is actively being used as a weapon against them.
Both India and China have rejected the price cap: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_crude_oil_price_c.... The price cap drove market prices lower, and India has continued to buy at market price. The reason the price cap was so high was because negotiations in mid-2022 revealed that developing nations wouldn’t go along.
> Since Indian refiners are already getting Russian crude at $60 a barrel or below, there will hardly be a negative impact of the price cap on India
India and China’s official position is still that they’re not abusing by the price cap. Obviously they’re not going to pay more than what they were paying just to violate the cap. Trying to spin this as a win for the EU is odd.
I mean... if they neither "defects" (leading, potentially, to lack of supply for the other) and bids higher, they're benefiting from cheap fuel, right? Seems like they still sorta win, the only cost of abiding is that if they raised their bids they might be able to buy more of their overall fuel consumption at a higher (but still below-the-rest-of-the-market) rate, probably amounting to little further savings (and maybe none—if all major buyers defect and offer to pay more, the price of Russian fuel would approach that on the rest of the market). They can secretly hand-shake with one another on sticking to the cap, and just not say so publicly, leaving their options open. Doesn't seem like much of a sacrifice on their part, they'd have to really want to give "the West" the middle finger to not abide by the cap, I'd think.
>This is extremely incorrect. India is buying Russian gas and cooperating on payment networks to bypass American sanctions
Not participating in western sanctions isn't "providing assistance", it's the default state. That being said, it's interesting that BRICS countries aren't selling weapons to Russia and it has to get them from Iran and North Korea.
Western countries expect everyone to abide by sanctions. When other countries don’t go along, it’s not the “default state” it’s a political statement. For example, India did ultimately stop buying Iranian oil: https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/did-india-need-to-sto...
yeah. some people here aren't grasping that it's important to the "western" nations that india does in fact buy russian oil and gas. Any words in public otherwise are just for show.
> China launched the AIIB in 2013 in order to bolster and facilitate the BRI across Asia. Beijing possesses 30 percent of voting shares in the bank, resulting in effective veto power over any funding decisions that require a supermajority. Yet not only is India, which considers China to be its biggest geopolitical threat, a founding member of the bank, but it also constitutes its largest borrower, relying on AIIB loans for COVID-19 aid and to fund multiple domestic infrastructure projects.
There are a lot of people in Bangladesh that are not very happy with Indian domination re: Teesta river, Adani loans, etc. Moreover I think they are more anti-NATO rather than pro-Russia.
I should say PPA technically rather than loans but Adani turned around and took loans from Indian state owned lenders to build the plant which they will probably not be too worried about repaying anytime soon let alone with the money they will make off of BD if PPA isn’t cancelled
Even Saudi are turning on us (USA). Under the previous administration, they were a semi-reliable partner. This is going to have disastrous consequences for the dollar.
"India and China are enemies, they keep having border skirmishes."
Border skirmishes with sticks and fists actually - commanders on both sides firmly respect the "no firearms" rule. The only deaths were in the 2020 flare up. Since then, the recent encounters have been quite literally "body checking" the border with muscle.
Yet the current skirmishes and any future skirmishes have not and will not affect ongoing trade and investment.
India still has $119 billion trade with China. China is India's top trading partner in 2023. There is also significant Chinese investment in India - Oppo, Vivo, Fosun, etc.
Meanwhile Russia continues to be the single largest supplier of crude oil for India, which is converted into petrol and diesel at refineries, for a fifth straight month by supplying more than one-third of all oil India imported.
India is ambivalent/negative to Ukraine and generally abstains from all US proposals that are anti-Russian. Ukraine had voted against India several times in the UNSC and also armed Pakistan and this is remembered by the Indian government.
Some Americans appear to mistake BRICS as some sort of political/military alliance. It is not - its a trade/economy focused alliance whose founding impetus was the 2008 economic crisis where the world paid the price for bad US economic policies.
There is also a movement away from the US dollar to other national currencies in BRICS nations - though India is not a part of this movement - the US is India's second largest trading partner after all.
I believe he was looking for cheap oil to kick-start the economy. But Pakistan doesn't have the special refineries that India has to process Russian oil anyways, so he would have been better served to stay silent and do stuff quietly in the background.
Unfortunately, he made a fuss and the US subtly engineered his departure. He is now effectively a non-entity.
How does one get elected to be the president of the bank of something that is 'not real'...
> BRICS members don't even vote in each other's favor in the UN. Russia has received zero meaningful assistance from them during the war in Ukraine.
False. And even if true, that wouldnt change the existence of the actual organization, its rules, and the arrangements in between countries.
What happens in the UN is mostly PR. Brazil voted to condemn the war in Ukraine because the left-wing segment that Lula and his crowd belongs to condemns all wars, and yet it voted in favor of the Nord Stream investigation.
> India and China are enemies, they keep having border skirmishes. South Africa is a failed state and it has negligible influence on the world stage. Brazil is one of the reasons why the term "middle-income trap" was devised......It's entirely possible that in the future a real anti-western bloc will emerge. But it isn't BRICS
This feels like a lot of reality-denial. Or copium at best...
I think it's a bit of both. There is a real organization, with real interests, that are at this point mostly being held together by the desire to no longer be dominated by the US-centric dollar-based system. If the US fades, this unifying principle will disappear over time, and the unity of this organization would as well. Already some of what it has accomplished, to some great fanfare in certain places, strikes me as being nothing more, and nothing less, than that.
It isn't as unified as some would like to present, and it isn't something that the existing world powers should just ignore as irrelevant. It's complicated. It's a complicated time in world history, as transitions are.
> If the US fades, this unifying principle will disappear over time
Working, functional partnership do not dissolve easily. The Eu, despite all its problems is a good example. Even the US-controlled system was one - it had a lot of disadvantages, but it worked to some degree, and it kept going on.
BRICS and the analogues that are converging with it are multilateral, egalitarian partnerships that worked well for all their participants, totally independent of the US. Some favored US allies kept increasing their BRICS participation even while they got a lot of benefits from the US. So its unlikely that they would just leave.
To simplify, BRICS and its analogues seem to be what the WTO would be without the 'special rules based order' that the US was subjecting everyone to, and the blackmailing influence of the Anglosaxon dominated financial system. (as can be seen from what happened recently with 'sanctions' and the resulting confiscations of money).
That was the last straw actually, all the countries that are rushing to BRICS as of this moment, started those initiatives immediately after 'asset seizures', or, rather, theft, that was effected on their enemies by the US, the UK and the supposedly neutral Switzerland. The 'neutrality' was discovered to be a farce and the 'rules based order' discovered to be able to change its rules whenever, however it suit its rule-makers.
The result is everyone applying to BRICS membership or observer status...
> > If the US fades, this unifying principle will disappear over time.
> Working, functional partnership do not dissolve easily.
I would suggest you may want to consider the fairly vast gulf between what I said and what you seem to think I said.
As all organizations eventually converge into their primary purpose becoming their own perpetuation, I'm sure the BRICS will be around far longer than I will. The UN, a much larger organization already far past its prime and effectively bereft of purpose, lurches on at a scale essentially incomprehensible to the human mind, yet it does not die, because such things rarely do, and effectively never on a sensible time scale.
Without an enemy unifying it, BRICS will eventually just be the UN 2.0.
But it will take time, decades probably, to get there.
The really entertaining question to ponder is, when will the US, or at least something that is composed of some chunk of the 50 states (the territories may well do so much sooner), apply to join the BRICS?
I'd mostly agree with this analysis. I don't see them holding together absent the unipolar NATO-dominated world giving them common ground, as they're mainly composed of the top representative states of all three major non-NATO blocs from the Cold War (Soviet, Maoist, and "3rd world" movement) and there's a reason those three groups weren't all pals back then.
>Huh? Its an actual organization with actual rules and actual institutions.
Of course, the organization exists, it wasn't my point.
> False.
What is false?
The UN votes? Recent example: UN resolution A/ES-11/L.7 ("Principles of the Charter of the United Nations underlying a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in Ukraine"). The only countries that voted against are Belarus, Eritrea, Mali, Nicaragua, North Korea, Russia and Syria. Brazil supported the resolution, while China, India and South Africa abstained.
Lack of assistance? I haven't seen Russia using, say, Chinese missiles or tanks in Ukraine. They import weapons from Iran. It's odd, considering that China is a major arms exporter.
>This feels like a lot of reality-denial. Or copium at best...
What part is "reality denial"? Are you saying that India and China aren't having border skirmishes? South Africa is a healthy state? Brazil isn't a middle-income country?
That's because Russian misses and tanks are better (as are their aircraft) than anything China can produce. Russia has no issue so far producing these domestically (evidenced by their usage contrary to predictions this time last year that they'd be out soon).
However, they are getting stuff like consumer drones, vests and clothing from China. And drones from Iran. Russia is behind on certain types of drones (but are very successful with domestic ones for taking out stationary targets like artillery):
I am not able to find the image I think I have seen as evidence. The US has "confirmed" ie accused with all it's political capital that Russia has fired Chinese made ammunition in Ukraine. It could have actually come from North Korea, as Russia bought millions of shells from them.
No tanks or missiles yet, but it also took the US and EU about a year to finally send tanks. China is very likely weighing the pros and cons of assisting Russia in this war.
I'm not sure what to make of your claim regarding the accusations, I haven't heard that, and even then, you seem to be trying to change the topic from China providing weaponry to any rando providing weaponry that happens to have been made in China – we're discussing the former, as the lack thereof indicates the lack of strong Chinese ties to russia
Yeah. They are 'corrupt'. And the US billionaires that regularly get their sunken business ventures, banks and investments bailed out by the American taxpayer are not corrupt.
...
The ability in some Angloamerican and 'Western' segments to publicly talk with this kind of double standard is amazing. You have billonaires. They have corrupt oligarchs. All is well in the world and all that...
Yeah, they bring up SVB as a paragon of virtue in order to hide the true issues and clamp down on any doubleplusungoodspeak in the service of their secret paymasters.
...
The ability of China shills to whatabout any discussion of their bailout bank for the Belt&Road Initiative masquerading as a tool for "shared prosperity" is truly amazing. They deny genocide occurring in their boarders today, and we acknowledge genocide 200 years ago. All is well in the world and all that...
Yeah, like go look at the pro-Western Wikipedia article on BRICS which clearly states it's real and has had a summit. The original comment is just plainly false.
I think he's pointing out that BRICS seems to be less strategic than the media makes it out to be. Looking at the topics in their summits they seem to be more of a debate group, but I've only known about them for the past 15 min.
> This feels like a lot of reality-denial. Or copium at best...
You should defend your point otherwise it just sounds like your feelings were hurt as well.
I guess? I mean, I know India and China did not sanction Russia and still freely trade with them. Probably Brazil as well? The "Global South" or everything outside of US/UK & Commonwealth/EU/Japan def acts far more independently in global politics while the aforementioned seem to be in lockstep.
Sorry, always think of India & Pakistan as different because they were occupied territories as opposed to colonies populated by British & European immigrants.
There is an enormous anti-Washington bloc. So what, it isn't perfectly encapsulated in a single organization yet. That's natural due to its rapid growth.
And they're proving it. The Western block is around a billion people. There are nearly 8 billion people on the planet now.
On the import side - you can buy fresh Mexican avocados from any grocery chain anywhere in Russia (the logistics behind that are not trivial). As can you Japanese whiskey, Korean appliances, Chinese cars and a whole other host of products that Soviet citizens could have never even dreamed of. And of course, all the western stuff just he labels are in various foreign languages.
On the export side - oil products to India, China and others are up big time. As are high tech heavy industry products (machines of various types) but you don't hear about much but what do you think powers Chinese aircraft? Nuclear reactors, rockets (hello, NASA). They produce as much steel as the US (with half the population) as well as very important agricultural inputs.
And there's more than BRICS going on right now. There's also:
- International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC)
- Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
- Northern Sea Route (Russia's been busy building nuclear icebreakers)
in the UN votes condemning russian aggression and condemning russian annexations, russia received the support of fewer than 3% of countries in the world, representing less than 3% of people in the world, including themselves
India being characterized as a member of an Anti Western bloc seems rather far fetched considering their partnership with Washington, against another member of that block (China).
>India being characterized as a member of an Anti Western bloc
Binary thinkers forget there are 3 states, with us, against us, and independent.
BRICS countries aren't anti anyone, they are just asserting their independence in a world where Western countries have historically been hostile to that position.
I was responding to the OP who was claiming that "There is an enormous anti-Washington bloc" in reference to BRICS.
Non aligned movement has existed for a long time, but in the context here India is not completely non aligned. They have been the target of aggression by China which has resulted in the deaths of Indian soldiers. And the US has supported them against this aggression[1].
Ukraine and Poland definitely don't want war right now, they'd very much just like the Russians to stop and leave.
The position of the countries that want "peace" is bizarre in the media: "you should just stop fighting the invader and then it's no longer war. You don't want war do you?"
> The position of the countries that want "peace" is bizarre in the media: "you should just stop fighting the invader and then it's no longer war. You don't want war do you?"
It’s not “bizarre” just calculated. Most of the world doesn’t give a shit about Ukraine and would be perfectly happy for Russia to annex it so long as the economic disruption from the sanctions and oil price increases stop. They can’t outright say it because western countries are big trade partners but that’s what they mean reading between the lines.
Not sure you can blame them can you? If they concede territory that's just a message of "invade later for more". It's also pretty hard to give concessions when the rhetoric of your opponent doesn't make any sense. Effectively Russia doesn't want Ukraine to be Ukraine one way or another.
All these fun little man-made island resorts with a full landing strip and a complement of fighter-bombers and medium range missiles, just for protection - they're just for tourism!
a little over a year ago, russia literally escalated their 2014 war in Ukraine, seems russia wants war the most, having both started and escalated this one
>BRICS members don't even vote in each other's favor in the UN.
The United States is frequently at odds with its G7 partners when it comes to UN votes, especially those involving the Middle East. Does that mean the G7 is fake?
>>India and China are enemies, they keep having border skirmishes.
As an Indian speaking very frankly India and China are frenemies. There is going to be no major war between these two. Contrary to whatever it looks from a distance, it won't.
India and China are very likely to indulge in intense co-operative competition with Russia as an another mediating partner. In many ways this is already the case.
I also believe over time a similar equation will emerge between India and Pakistan and China playing the same role as Russia in this case.
It is not unusual that India and China are at odds sometimes. It is however a big mystery why EU and USA get along so well. The globe should feel a little too small for these ones.
EU and USA have their spats, but overall they share relatively similar values and have similar interests in maintaining the general status quo. Both are content enough with their position in the world to not go around fighting over territory.
Lately they're also putting an effort into getting along well because any significant disagreement might bleed into the Ukraine war in some manner.
We don't get along so well. See the data processing agreements that are just ping-ponging in the courts because they are incompatible with EU laws. This causes similar issues with the use of American social media in Europe as the US' concerns about TikTok. It's an uneasy friendship at best.
Interest in NATO was also waning, but of course Putin's recent aggression has revitalized this in a big way.
Say a term enough times and it gets established by people who repeat it. Like "nanoparticles", or "data science" or "codes".
Ironically, by venting about how BRICS is not a thing, you've helped a tiny bit more into making it a thing for people who read your post. That's just how it works.
South Africa has a steadily growing GDP, and is one of the least corrupt countries in Africa. GDP has been growing steadily despite issues with the state owned energy provider Eskom. The private sector is robust against government incompetence. It’s not easy to live here, but the opportunities are massive (because the playing field is open if you are skilled).
South Africa is a deteriorating shithole. My mother was telling me that they want to move to guarded security estate because she is afraid she might be raped, and my father bludgeoned in their home. (NB: they’re not under threat because of their race, rather because that’s what criminals do).
The police are dumb as rocks and totally lazy: look at the Boksburg tanker blast in December to see how they don’t GAF about doing their jobs.the public was standing around a burning gas tanker taking pictures for social media for hours before it exploded and killed dozens. The police only pitched after the explosion.
There is no serious border control, and any mention of it is shut down as “xenophobic” by the media and business that want to flout labour regulations by hiring undocumented migrants from the rest of Africa, despite the obscene unemployment rate.
The electricity situation has been discussed at length here previously, but it’s strangling the economy.
Sure you can make money if you are skilled, but you can make better money using those skills in any number of other countries.
The only thing that’s keeping many middle-class South Africans from emigrating is the cheap domestic help. They are happy to exploit the obscene inequality since it gives them cheap labour. They live in terror of washing their own clothes and cleaning their own toilets.
In any case, apart from many Afrikaners, whites are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion about South Africa’s future-they’re dwindling as a percentage of the population because of aging, emigration, higher black birth rates and inward migration from other African counties.
>whites are increasingly irrelevant to the discussion about South Africa’s future-they’re dwindling as a percentage
Not true, the owners of the vast majority of SA land are still a tiny white minority. As long as this is the case, they are relevant.
>The country is, objectively, deteriorating.
The world's worst wealth inequality [0] will do that to a country until resolved. As I mentioned above, the transition will not be comfortable and anyone expecting it to be is wildly misinformed.
[0] "South Africa is the most economically unequal country in the world, according to the World Bank. The difference between wealthy and poor in South Africa has been increasing steadily since the end of apartheid in 1994, and this inequality is closely linked to racial divisions in society."
India and China have both managed to uplift their economies in the last 30 years without the “discomfort” of violent crime, increasing corruption, the collapse of state institutions and an inability to generate electricity.
Of course reducing everyone to grinding poverty is one way of reducing inequality, but it’s hard to see what the utility of that would be.
Blacks will, and do, bear the brunt of the deterioration anyway.
>India and China have both managed to uplift their economies in the last 30 years without the “discomfort” of violent crime, increasing corruption, the collapse of state institutions and an inability to generate electricity.
India didn't start out with massive amounts of inequality and is still working at building while dealing with a poverty crisis. It isnt close to the finish line.
China, the most successful at transitioning, had inequality comparable to South Africa at one point. That is precisely what Mao targeted when he came to power. Their effort, which involved redistribution of >90% of the land from tiny minority (<10%) ownership, stamping out corruption, and solving domestic production issues; could hardly be described as comfortable.
Foreign powers worked overtime to sabotage the Chinese effort like they have and will continue to do in South Africa as it gets started on this path away from economic apartheid.
The good news is, modern South Africa being a part of BRICS may be useful in reducing inequality more rapidly by employing wisdom gained by other members... but there will still be discomfort.
The history surrounding this kind of scenario is very clear and not as rosey as your description. Luckily SA is not resource poor and its allies are some of the most capable nation builders on the planet.
>Foreign powers worked overtime to sabotage the Chinese effort
>Mao’s reforms led to millions of deaths. China grew after the 70s.
Most of the deaths were due to trade embargoes set by western powers (mainly US & UK) that restricted emergency food and other imports leading up to and during an emerging famine.
Even though its an unpopular observation in the west, China's following 60 years of growth wouldve been stunted without Mao's decolonization efforts.
The government is bad for sure. But has SA ever not had a shitty government? Maybe briefly between 1994 to 2008. But it’s pretty nice to build my business here. The government sure as shit won’t be building the country up. Businesses will, and it’s happening.
GDP growth seems to have been in the 1-2% area for the past 10y. That's ok for a developed economy but that's low for a developing country that needs to pull its population out of poverty. Also I'm not sure that "one of the least corrupt countries in Africa" is such a high bar.
Let’s put it this way. In South Africa it’s not a constant onslaught of having to pay people off government officials, like in all other sub-Saharan countries I’ve been in.
Lots of anti-South African bias on HN. Few of these statements are correct or have any basis in fact. We are not doing great, but doing as bad as the comments suggest.
Are there any good resources to learn more about South African history and the contemporaneous situation in a cohesive manner?
I ask because like perhaps many, I've read a number of novels by Zakes Mda and it has sparked an interest. They're wonderful books, very emotional and beautifully written, but it's like looking at South Africa through a kaleidoscope, not all that much really comes into focus intellectually. Unfortunately my school education on the country was also basically nil.
Original term (referring to no formal organization) was BRIC, coined in 2001. BRICs common as a plural form, as in "the BRICs" (which I recall seeing), but not BRICS. The four countries started holding summits in 2009, and in 2010 declared South Africa part of the group, at which point a specific sense of the term (referring to invitees to these summits and members of related efforts or organizations) became BRICS.
China and Russia are partners, allies. Are you one of those people who sits there furiously praying they’ll fight WWIII against each other? It’s delusional.
Anti-"western" block will come and go in droves as long as they are petulant children blocks, built on the contrarianism - "just make everything opposite of what west thinks and does". And since sociopaths who usually come to power with similar ideology are usually incompetent, these blocks and countries will continue to fail like clockwork.
Lots of comments here are trying to poke holes in the parent comment, and missing its substance as a consequence.
There is, first and foremost, the elephant in the room which everyone ignores because everyone's thinking Russia these days. That elephant is China, which acts as the extremely valuable missing link to G7 economies. China and the G7 group are wholy interdependent, whether they're willing to admit it or not. One without the other, at least at this moment in time, would be Chapter 1 of a dystopian novel about societal collapse. We've had a whiff of that during the supply chain crisis in the pandemic -- and that was just some clogged logistics.
Anyone taking this as proof that BRICS is now its own thing that can stand on its own is just as wrong as anyone thinking that G7 is its own thing that can stand on its own. They're not. And any factor that's straining the relation between the two blocs (via China) is not likely to be viewed with wholly favourable eyes by either parties, even though some of them can't acknowledge that publicly due to ideological reasons, or are happy to let it be for as long as it causes more trouble on the other side.
Second, lots of the economic activity that happens inside BRICS is decidedly not happening in the "cooperation" side of the cooperation-competition-conflict framework, or within any unreservedly friendly quadrant of any framework. Russia, for instance, is a major supplier for the Indian defense industry not so much because of historical socialist ties, but because it's the only major supplier it can realistically deal with without major restrictions. It has a hot border dispute with China, another hot border dispute with a regional ally (Pakistan) of another major supplier (US and the NATO bloc), and has fought real wars with both in the last sixty years.
Russia and China aren't sharing fatherly influence over India and Bangladesh, or over post-Soviet Asia, they're competing for influence in much of it. Just like China and Brazil are competing for regional influence in some of South America, just like China and South Africa are competing for regional influence in some of Africa.
Third, people are also forgetting an important lesson from recent history: on the eve of World War II, Franco-German commercial relations were extraordinary. Actually, Germany had excellent trade relations with most of Europe. Most of the arguments about BRICS today readily translate to FIGUC (France, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom, Czechoslovakia) cca. 1936, including caveats like they're backing opposite parties in some regional conflicts/civil war. Economic interests and common enemies are transitory; geopolitical aspirations are far more durable.
This isn't to say that BRICS is "not a real alliance". It is, it's bound by real economic relations, and there is plenty of competition within the G7 bloc as well. However, its potential for global cooperation outside the economic sphere is greatly diminished by the current state of mutual foreign relations, and competition, between its members. BRICS cannot, at least for now, achieve any more than G7 could've achieved back when Germany was trying to widen its military supply sources so as not to depend on France because there was a real chance they might into it over Alsace, the way India is now trying to widen its military supply sources so as not to depend on China or the US because there's a real chance they might get into it over LoCs in Kashmir.
Yes. Jim O'Neil (the economist in question) grouped them together in a piece of economic research for Goldman Sachs as examples of fast-growing developing economies that he believed would overtake the G7 in terms of GDP by 2050. [1] They weren't ever imagined as a political grouping that would work together as far as I know.
The article in not about BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) which still has an aggregate GPD a little more than half the G7 one (at least according to a cursory google search) but about BRICS-extended which include a lot of petro-states and south-east asian countries.
An interesting article but the title is clickbait.
It's only referring to BRICS. You are looking at nominal GDP, and not Purchasing Power Adjusted (PPP). If a dollar goes twice as far in China, then their nominal GDP would need to be doubled to get the "real" comparable value. That's what PPP is.
I thought it was the other way around? Nominal was supposed to be better for comparing overall economic heft among countries, while PPP is better for internal measures and comparisons in living standards (GDP PPP per capita for example)?
While it would not be surprising if China had pass the US due to sheer population size differences alone, there is data that makes it a valid question as to whether that has actually happened or not. On an annual basis, “non-free” countries seem to overstate GDP growth, which has a compounding effect over the long-run, resulting in large gaps between stated and actual GDP.
Did you read the article, or maybe the relevant paper? Did you consider the people doing the research aren’t dumb and look to see if maybe they thought of alternate explanations?
Or did it not confirm some existing beliefs so you returned immediately and said “this is dumb” and walked away from it?
> maybe the relevant paper? Did you consider the people doing the research aren’t dumb and look to see if maybe they thought of alternate explanations?
Martinez 2017 study has been loled to death by night time data analysts familar with the dataset and its limits. It's rudimentry methods only useful to generate clickbait headlines - it's actually that dumb. Every few years he "updates" study with new weak data but not better methods to be republished. I think latest is 3rd revision. For reference, much more sophisticated light study by NBER (by multiple FED economists on one country vs assistant prof on entire world) conducted same year concluded PRC growth was higher than PRC reported GDP, by ~10%. In line with several studies (like CSIS broken abacus) that use much more rigorous methods. But Martinez's democracy vs authoritarian narrative gets republished every few years because the alternate explanation is stupid studies that confirm western biases gets more clicks.
Again, studies using better data/methods that tried to calc PRC GDP and conclude it's been underreported bt 10-20% as of 2010s data. Which makes sense because PRC incentivized to over report population and under report gdp to stay under high income per capita to stretch development perks reserved for developing countries. That's without going into PRC's conservative GDP estimation methods (relative to developed economies) that underestimate imputed vlaues from rent to consumption that would tag on another 10-20%. This has been pattern since the beginning for PRC global integration, i.e. in 80s PRC and IMF used different surveys to negotiate per capita values to base future gdp calcs, IMF wanted $250 vs PRC wanted $150 and settled somewhere under %200. The TLDR is PRC would rather appear poorer than she is on paper.
This conspiracy theory would also have to account for what China is doing with all of the energy it's consuming (and how it's paying for this energy) if it's not manifesting as GDP.
I'm aware that China's economic collapse has been continuously predicted for the last 30 years, but they nevertheless continue to produce more and more real commodities and infrastructure. Of course that doesn't hold a candle to our services-rent-IP-speculation economy here in the US.
Sure, central gov _chose_ to cracked on on the sector, but the denial is that will lead to doomer level of collapse portrayed in western media. Here's a recent primer on PRC land finance and why market remains resilient / impact on gov finance overblow.
The real denial is western analysts with little understanding of why real estate crack down won't lead to PRC collapse. At end of the day, realestate is about as wasteful as US extravagant health care spending in % terms. Inefficient sure, but not end of the world in terms of misallocation. Even less so when ~100m surplus/vacant housing units still not enough for 200m that needs to be rehomed to bring urbanization from 65% to 80% in next 20 years.
But honestly, there isn’t much value in joining it. BRICS is basically china, take china out and it is a minuscule thing. And there isn’t even much cooperation between BRICS countries, it’s just a bloc to make china look bigger than it actually is
India and China are enemies, they keep having border skirmishes. South Africa is a failed state and it has negligible influence on the world stage. Brazil is one of the reasons why the term "middle-income trap" was devised.
BRICS members don't even vote in each other's favor in the UN. Russia has received zero meaningful assistance from them during the war in Ukraine.
It's entirely possible that in the future a real anti-western bloc will emerge. But it isn't BRICS.