BRICS has emerged as one of the most dynamic groups on the international stage, with its core expansion accompanied by a significant rise in the number of developing economies eager to join the platform.
While the growing appeal of BRICS in the Global South is a positive development, experts are increasingly questioning how this enhanced inclusiveness can be harmonized with greater efficiency. A primary concern is that expanding membership might complicate the consensus-building process within BRICS. As inclusivity becomes an inevitable trend, one of the main challenges for the BRICS family is to merge this trend with improved effectiveness in the group's operations.
In the pursuit of balancing inclusiveness and efficiency, China plays a pivotal role. As the initiator of the \"BRICS Plus\" cooperation model in 2017, China sparked a wave of applications from developing economies seeking to join the BRICS family.
While China has been instrumental in making BRICS more inclusive, there is now an opportunity to focus on initiatives that enhance the group's effectiveness. This includes prioritizing economic cooperation among BRICS Plus economies, particularly in trade and investment.
Another strategy involves achieving greater scale while emphasizing pragmatic economic cooperation. One potential approach is to establish a BRICS Plus \"partnership belt\" for regional integration arrangements, with the core BRICS economies as members.
This initiative would enable a significant expansion of the BRICS partnership circle through the regional partners of the group's core economies. More importantly, it would create a platform for trade liberalization among BRICS Plus economies, whose trade policies are increasingly influenced by their regional integration blocs.
The integration of regional blocs led by BRICS core economies could facilitate the cooperation of regional development institutions—such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Eurasian Development Bank—from the Global South in co-financing priority projects worldwide.
Coordination of this cooperation could be managed by the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), which is becoming a more active participant in global economic and investment platforms.
Reference(s):
BRICS at a crucial juncture: Between inclusiveness and efficiency
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