Conservative Globalizers: Reconsidering the Rise of the Rest

Conservative Globalizers: Reconsidering the Rise of the Rest
The leaders of the five BRICS countries at the 6th BRICS Summit, Fortaleza, Brazil, July 15, 2014 (South Africa GCIS photo, CC BY-ND 2.0).

Assessments of the largest emerging economies—China, India and Brazil—and their global influence have been as volatile as each of their stock markets. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the buoyancy of their economies supported both a global recovery and their status as the rising powers of the 21st century. Now, the boom decade after 2001 seems a distant memory.

As China’s economy slows from supercharged to respectable growth and rebalancing curbs its demand for commodities, growth in commodity-producing countries, Brazil among them, has slumped. Even India, which surpassed China’s growth rate for the first time in 2015, confronts a stalled economic reform program under Prime Minister Narendra Modi and faces longer-term obstacles to its ambitions to become a manufacturing powerhouse that would rival China. Ruchir Sharma, a prominent analyst on the economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—the group of emerging economies known as BRICS—has argued that current distress in these former dynamos reveals an underlying fragility in these once-rising powers.

The current downgrading of the BRICS’ economic prospects and their future global role has probably overshot reality. Although China’s boom is over and its high-growth years are unlikely to return, these economies, after a difficult adjustment, are likely to outpace their industrialized counterparts, which face their own demographic and economic barriers to sustained growth. Furthermore, the BRICS’ global ambitions—economic as well as political—are unlikely to disappear, even though their economic clout may be temporarily diminished.

Keep reading for free!

Get instant access to the rest of this article by submitting your email address below. You'll also get access to three articles of your choice each month and our free newsletter:

Or, Subscribe now to get full access.

Already a subscriber? Log in here .

What you’ll get with an All-Access subscription to World Politics Review:

A WPR subscription is like no other resource — it’s like having a personal curator and expert analyst of global affairs news. Subscribe now, and you’ll get:

  • Immediate and instant access to the full searchable library of tens of thousands of articles.
  • Daily articles with original analysis, written by leading topic experts, delivered to you every weekday.
  • Regular in-depth articles with deep dives into important issues and countries.
  • The Daily Review email, with our take on the day’s most important news, the latest WPR analysis, what’s on our radar, and more.
  • The Weekly Review email, with quick summaries of the week’s most important coverage, and what’s to come.
  • Completely ad-free reading.

And all of this is available to you when you subscribe today.