BRICS

BRICS’ New Development Bank headquarters in Shanghai.

BRICS is an acronym that refers to the developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. In 2022 Iran, Argentina and Algeria applied to join the group to make BRICS+. Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Nigeria, Senegal, Thailand, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan have expressed interest in joining.

BRICS is not a free trade bloc, but members do coordinate on trade matters and have established a policy bank, the New Development Bank, (NDB) to coordinate infrastructure loans. That was set up in 2014 in order to provide alternative loan mechanisms from the IMF and World Bank structures, which the members had felt had become too US-centric. The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) was set up by China at about the same time for largely the same reasons and to offer alternative financing than that provided by the IMF and World Banks, which were felt to impose political reform policies designed to assist the United States in return for providing loans. Both the NDB and AIIB banks are Triple A rated and capitalised at US$100 billion. The NDB bank shares are held equally by each of the five members. In total, the BRICS grouping as it currently stands accounts for over 40% of the global population and nearly a quarter of the world’s GDP. The GDP figure is expected to double to 50% of global GDP by 2030.

The BRICS group is essentially a group of nations that do not want corporations and multinational banks running their government. BRICS countries want their government running their government, whatever form of government that exists in their nation, even if it is communist.

BRICS leaders are aligned as anti-corporatist and anti-fascist, which simply means they want to make the decisions, and they do not want multinational corporations to become more powerful than the government. The BRICS group are essentially the opposing element to the World Economic Forum. BRICS is working to devise measures to prevent the kind of predatory military assaults the U.S. carried out against Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

## See also[edit]

* Belt and Road Initiative

## External link[edit]

* BRICS Information Portal