The BRICS decision to admit as partners from 2024 six new countries, including Argentina, is further evidence of the Chinese-led group’s attempt to counterbalance the influence of the United States as a global power and also a sign of dissatisfaction with the G20, an enlargement of the G7 that took place in 1998, during the crisis of Southeast Asian economies, to accommodate emerging economies such as China itself and d others from Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The BRICS appeared as an acronym coined in 2001 by Jim O’Neill, a Goldman Sachs emerging markets analyst who initially grouped Brazil, Russia, India and China, countries that held their first summit as a group in 2009 and became larger and pluralized the following year with the “S” for South Africa. The group notably excludes the United States and Canada, in North America, Western European countries and Australia, a geographically close country with a very high level of trade with China and South Asian countries. -East.

From the point of view of economic weight, the 6 new partners would not bring much muscle. The GDP of the current partners is already 27.7 trillion (millions of millions) of dollars and the new incorporations would add approximately 3.2 trillion, or 11.6% more, which would make the group explain more than 50% of the population and about 30% of the population. World GDP.

The difference between members and participants is notorious; While China has a GDP of nearly $20 trillion, the only new partner to achieve unity is Saudi Arabia, with $1.1 trillion. The other contributions must be measured in decimals: that of Ethiopia is 0.156 billion, that of Iran 0.367, that of Egypt 0.387, that of the United Arab Emirates 0.499 and that of Argentina 0.641 billion (in Spanish ).

China alone is more than two-thirds of the current BRICS, a proportion that won’t vary much in the augmented BRICS, which will lose the acronym’s benefits unless someone finds one of the 11 letters. But, as the Brazilian geopolitical analyst points out Olivier Stuenkelprofessor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation and author of the book The BRICS and the future of the world orderin a recent column in the weekly The Economistthe BRICS are already “an international brand” and it will be difficult for them to give up this advantage.

One of the strong points, much higher than that of their GDP, is that they are generally countries with a surplus in international trade and a large volume of reserves. So, for example, according to the most recent data from the International Monetary Fund, measured in millions of dollars, those of China are 3,345,137 million dollars, those of India are 596,512 million, those of Russia are 582,418 million, those from Saudi Arabia (one of the new guests) 442 billion, those from Brazil 345.475 million and those from Mexico (another guest) 207.461 million. Contrast that with the $24,091 million in “gross” reserves (net reserves are negative) that as of June 30 the Fund declared for Argentina.

For a country hungry for reserves and credit, one incentive is to access credit from the New BRICS Development Bank (NDB), created in 2014 and currently chaired by the former president of Brazil, Dilma Rouseff. Although joining the NDB is not exactly the same, joining the BRICS is almost an automatic transition. The NDB has already granted more than $30 billion and already counts among its members Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (two of the new BRICS guests), as well as Bangladesh and Uruguay.

According to Stuenkel, BRICS membership has become “an important part of their foreign policy identity.”

Its appeal has also increased with one of the consequences of the Russian invasion and the war in Ukraine: the freezing of Russian financial assets, including some of its Central Bank, abroad, and the withdrawal of international banking system SWIFT. These sanctions, writes the economic historian Nicholas Mulderin a book on the effectiveness and effects of economic and financial sanctions and punishments in times of war, have the contraindication that they encourage those who are sanctioned to deviate from the existing rules of the game and institutions.

These rules and institutions are fundamentally identified with the dominance of the dollar as the international currency and the role of institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the International Trade Organization (WTO), as the main arbiters of the economic order. global.

Argentina and Bangladesh, a note from the Financial Times on the expansion of the BRICS today recalls, have resorted to the Chinese currency (the renminbi, or yuan) in response to their shortage of dollars. In the case of Argentina, to cover a deadline with the IMF, and in the case of Bangladesh, to pay Russia for a nuclear power plant.

Time will tell if BRICS membership will solve such problems. The truth is that beyond the internal differences, what was born as an ingenious acronym is a reality that weighs more and more in international geopolitics. Despite various predictions of “its imminent end,” Stuenkel wrote, “The BRICS are a reality that is here to stay.

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