What is BRICS?
"BRICS" is an acronym coined to designate the five largest emerging economies in our world today: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Though they meet regularly - in yearly rotating summits - to promote commercial, political and cultural ties among each other, theirs is a rather loose association, with no real institutional framework (yet). The summits have nonetheless yielded important decisions, perhaps the most significant of which was the establishment of the New Development Bank in 2014, to rival the World Bank and the IMF.
This website does not aim to be a source of official information on BRICS. There are plenty of very good resources on the net for that purpose so we will limit ourselves to providing a few facts and let you carry on your own research via some of the links below. Happy browsing!
As we travel through each of the BRICS though, we will try our best to give you fun facts about the people, the culture, the food and the sights. Why don't you check out our country pages and our travel blog?
A few BRICS facts
Population
What is most striking about BRICS is not the strength of their association but their sheer combined weight. Together, these five developing and neo-industrialised giants make up 3 billion people, which is to say more than 40% of the world's population (as of 2016)!
Add to that a much faster rate of population growth than most industrialised nations and a much larger proportion of youth and it becomes really clear that BRICS matter.
Economy
Economically too, the BRICS have caught up with the G7 grouping of industrialised economies and become genuine heavyweights. Together they represent roughly 30% of world GDP in 2014, barely a fraction lower than what the USA, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy and Canada represent together. Given the rate at which their economies grow, however, it is predicted that by 2050, the combined economic weight of BRICS will be almost 60% higher than that of the G7.
