Not just straw men
The biggest emerging economies are rebounding, even without recovery in the West
THE inaugural summit of the BRICs—Brazil, Russia, India, China—came and went in Yekaterinburg this week with more rhetoric than substance. Although Russia’s president, Dmitry Medvedev, called it “the epicentre of world politics”, this disparate quartet signally failed to rival the Group of Eight industrial countries as a forum for economic discussion.
But that should be no surprise: to realise how disparate they are, consider that Russia and Brazil are big commodity exporters, whereas China is a big commodity importer; China is a proponent of the Doha trade round, India a sceptic; India and China vie for influence in the Indian Ocean, Russia and China compete in Central Asia.
Instead, the really striking thing is that four countries first lumped together as a group by the chief economist of Goldman Sachs chose to convene at all, and in such a high-profile way. And that when they met, they discussed topics such as reforming the IMF; their demand for more say in global policy-making; and, in the case of China, Brazil and Russia, a plan to switch some of their foreign-currency reserves out of dollars and into IMF bonds.
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