What Is BRICS: Emerging Economies and Their Growing Influence

From Acronym to Alliance

BRICS began as an investment banker's shorthand. In 2001, Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill coined the term "BRICs" (at the time without a capital S) in a research paper titled "Building Better Global Economic BRICs," arguing that Brazil, Russia, India, and China would collectively become a dominant force in the global economy by 2050. O'Neill's analysis was not a political prediction but a growth forecast: he identified these four large, fast-growing emerging economies as likely to outpace the G7 in total economic size within a generation. The term was purely an analyst's heuristic, not a description of any existing political relationship.

What happened next was one of the more unusual cases of a financial term acquiring political reality. The four governments identified by O'Neill began meeting informally at the sidelines of international events from 2006, convened their first formal summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia in June 2009, and formalized the grouping as a regular diplomatic forum. South Africa was invited to join in 2010, completing the acronym as we know it today. The transformation from Goldman Sachs acronym to diplomatic forum was driven by a shared interest among the founding members in having a platform for emerging-market perspectives in a global governance architecture they regarded as dominated by Western nations.

In 2024, BRICS underwent a dramatic expansion, admitting Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (Argentina had also been invited but declined to join following a change of government). Additional countries, including many in the Global South, have expressed interest in membership, and a new "BRICS Partner Country" category has been established. The expansion reflects the grouping's growing geopolitical ambition and its appeal to nations seeking alternatives or complements to Western-led international institutions. The expanded BRICS now represents approximately 36% of global GDP (at purchasing power parity), 46% of the world's population, and controls a significant share of global oil and gas reserves.

The Original Five: Shared Interests and Divergent Interests

The five original BRICS members were united by the label "emerging economy" and by certain shared grievances about the global order — underrepresentation in institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and UN Security Council relative to their economic and demographic weight — but they differ enormously in their political systems, economic structures, and strategic interests. China is an authoritarian single-party state and the world's second-largest economy. India is the world's largest democracy. Brazil and South Africa are multiparty democracies with very different domestic political alignments. Russia is an authoritarian system with a much smaller economy than the others but considerable military power and geopolitical ambitions.

China is by far the dominant economic power within BRICS, accounting for over 70% of the original five's combined GDP. This asymmetry creates a structural tension: China has an interest in using BRICS as a platform to advance its own global influence, while other members — particularly India — have interests in not simply becoming vehicles for Chinese geopolitical goals. India and China have disputed border territories and have engaged in military standoffs in recent years. Brazil and South Africa have closer ties with Western democracies than Russia or China do. The internal diversity of BRICS is both a challenge to cohesion and a source of the grouping's appeal: it demonstrates that alternative multilateral frameworks need not be anti-Western so much as multi-directional.

Intra-BRICS trade has grown substantially since the group's formation, but remains limited relative to each member's trade with non-BRICS partners, particularly the European Union and United States. China is a major trading partner for all other BRICS members, but the other members are not particularly important trading partners for each other. Economic complementarity is real — Brazil's agricultural commodities, Russia's energy resources, India's services, and South Africa's minerals all fit together — but the geography, infrastructure gaps, and currency friction involved in expanding intra-BRICS trade mean that its growth has been slower than some aspirational rhetoric suggests.

BRICS Institutions: The New Development Bank and Currency Debate

The most concrete institutional achievement of BRICS has been the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB), established in 2015 with initial capital of $100 billion, headquartered in Shanghai. The NDB was designed as an alternative to Western-dominated multilateral development banks — the World Bank and regional development banks that BRICS members felt imposed Western conditionalities on borrowers and prioritized Western-defined development models. The NDB finances infrastructure and sustainable development projects in member countries and other emerging economies, with an initial focus on green infrastructure.

The NDB has expanded its membership beyond the original five to include Bangladesh, Egypt, the UAE, Uruguay, and others, and has approved tens of billions in loans since its founding. Its governance structure gives each founding member equal voting rights, a notable departure from the capital-weighted voting that gives major donors outsized influence in the World Bank and IMF. However, the NDB's scale remains modest compared to established multilateral development banks, and the U.S. dollar remains the primary currency for its financing operations — somewhat ironic for an institution partly motivated by reducing dollar dependence.

The debate over de-dollarization — reducing reliance on the U.S. dollar in international trade and finance — is one of the most discussed and least resolved issues in BRICS diplomacy. The dollar's dominance in global trade, financial markets, and central bank reserves gives the United States a structural privilege that other countries (particularly those subject to U.S. sanctions, like Russia and Iran) experience as a geopolitical weapon. BRICS summits have repeatedly discussed creating a common BRICS currency or payment system, but progress has been very limited. The extreme difficulty of currency cooperation among countries with such different economic structures, inflation rates, and monetary policy frameworks means that a BRICS currency remains a distant aspiration rather than an imminent reality. Trade in national currencies — using Chinese renminbi, Indian rupees, or Brazilian reals for bilateral trade — has increased among some BRICS members, but the dollar's network externalities (the advantage of a currency that everyone else uses) are formidable.

The Geopolitical Dimension

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, BRICS has acquired an increasingly geopolitical character. Russia has sought to use BRICS as evidence that it is not internationally isolated, and China has found in BRICS a platform for advancing a multipolar world order narrative that challenges U.S.-led unipolarity. The expansion of BRICS to include Iran, Saudi Arabia, and UAE — major oil producers with complex relationships with Western powers — signals an ambitious effort to create an alternative geopolitical center of gravity.

However, the geopolitical narrative of BRICS as an anti-Western bloc is complicated by the diversity of its members' actual foreign policy orientations. India has maintained its traditional "strategic autonomy" policy, refusing to endorse Russia's invasion of Ukraine at the UN while maintaining economic relations with Moscow. Brazil under the current government has sought to position itself as a mediator rather than a partisan. Saudi Arabia and UAE have complex economic and security relationships with the United States that limit their willingness to take strongly anti-Western positions even within a BRICS framework. The grouping's consensus requirement for major decisions effectively gives each member a veto, constraining its ability to act as a unified geopolitical bloc.

The expansion to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and UAE in particular reflects a geopolitical calculus centered on the Middle East and Africa. Saudi Arabia's simultaneous maintenance of BRICS membership and the petrodollar system (though that relationship has become more complex), Iran's inclusion despite its confrontational relationship with the West, and Ethiopia's membership as a major African power all suggest a BRICS that is more geopolitically diverse and potentially more influential in global south than the original five could achieve alone.

BRICS and Global Governance Reform

One consistent theme across BRICS summits is the demand for reform of global governance institutions to better reflect the current distribution of economic power rather than the post-World War II distribution that shaped the original designs of the IMF, World Bank, and UN Security Council. The IMF's quota system (which determines voting power and access to financing) has been reformed incrementally but still gives European countries more voting weight than their current economic size warrants, while China and India remain underrepresented relative to their GDP. BRICS members have been vocal advocates for completing the quota reform process.

UN Security Council reform is an even more sensitive issue. India, Brazil, and South Africa all aspire to permanent Security Council membership, a goal they have pursued through the "G4" (along with Germany and Japan) as well as within BRICS. However, Security Council reform requires approval from current permanent members including China and Russia, who have their own complex interests in the reform debate — China, for example, is cautious about reforms that might complicate its own prerogatives, even while publicly supporting broader emerging-market representation.

The tension between BRICS as a reform movement (seeking better integration into and representation within existing global institutions) and BRICS as an alternative order (building parallel institutions to bypass or replace Western-dominated ones) is the central strategic ambiguity of the grouping. Most members, most of the time, favor the reform approach — they want the same kind of stability and rule-based order that existing institutions provide, just with a different power distribution within them. But the inclusion of Russia and Iran, both of which have stronger incentives to challenge rather than reform the existing order, pulls in a different direction. How this tension is resolved will significantly shape the BRICS grouping's trajectory and its role in 21st-century global governance.

BRICS in the Coming Decade

The BRICS grouping faces a defining decade. Its expansion to nine members (plus partner countries) dramatically increases its demographic and economic weight but also its internal diversity and potential for paralysis. Managing the integration of new members whose interests and relationships with existing members vary widely — particularly the complex relationship between Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the UAE within the Gulf region — will require diplomatic skill and institutional development that the grouping's informal structure does not naturally provide.

The global economic landscape is shifting in ways that create both opportunities and pressures for BRICS. The energy transition is disrupting the economic models of Russia and the Gulf states whose hydrocarbons dominate their export revenues. China's economic slowdown and its growing strategic competition with the United States creates pressures on all BRICS members who have deep economic ties with both. India's rapid economic growth and its increasingly active foreign policy are changing its weight within the grouping and its ability to shape BRICS's direction.

The ultimate significance of BRICS may be less in the specific institutions it creates or the specific policies it coordinates and more in what it represents: the end of the unipolar moment when the United States and its Western allies could effectively set the terms of international order without serious negotiation with the rest of the world. Whether BRICS coalesces into a coherent alternative or remains a diverse expression of global south aspirations without unified direction, its existence has already changed the diplomatic calculus of international relations — ensuring that any stable global governance architecture of the coming decades must be negotiated with, rather than imposed upon, the emerging economies that the grouping represents.