BRICS at a crucial juncture: Between inclusiveness and efficiency

By Yaroslav Lissovolik

BRICS has arguably become the most dynamic group on the international stage as its core expansion is coupled with a significant rise in the number of developing economies that have expressed their desire to join the platform.

But while the greater appeal of BRICS in the Global South is welcome, questions about how this greater inclusiveness could be combined with higher efficiency are increasingly being raised in the expert community. Most prominent among the experts' concerns is that increasing membership could make attaining consensus within BRICS more difficult. And while the shift to greater inclusivity is inexorable, one of the key challenges in the evolution of the BRICS family is the need to combine the trend with greater effectiveness in the group's operations.

In this quest to achieve a balance between inclusiveness and efficiency, China has a special role to play. After all, it was the initiator of the "BRICS Plus" cooperation model in 2017, engendering a wave of applications from developing economies to join the BRICS family.

While China has played a crucial role in rendering the evolution of BRICS more inclusive, there is scope now to focus on initiatives that will render BRICS more effective. This involves greater prioritization to economic cooperation among BRICS Plus economies, most notably in the sphere of trade and investment.

Another dimension is to attain greater scale while prioritizing pragmatic economic cooperation. One way to do this is to create a BRICS Plus "partnership belt" for regional integration arrangements in which the BRICS core economies are members.

This would allow for a significant expansion in the BRICS partnership circle via the regional partners of the group's core economies. Even more importantly, it would create a platform for trade liberalization among the BRICS Plus economies whose trade policy is increasingly determined by their regional integration blocs.

This co-integration of the regional blocs led by BRICS core economies could provide scope for the regional development institutions – most notably regional/multilateral development banks such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, Eurasian Development Bank and others from the Global South – to cooperate in co-financing priority projects across the developing world.

This cooperation among the regional development institutions could be coordinated by the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) that is becoming an increasingly active participant in global economic/investment platforms.

In this respect, another way to combine greater inclusivity and efficiency for BRICS is by expanding the membership of the NDB to include the regional partners of the core members of the group. This would widen the scope for connectivity projects and strengthen the foundations for regional integration across the Global South.

A further possibility is to upgrade the capabilities of the BRICS contingent reserve arrangement. Providing this facility with the instruments to support BRICS Plus economies would significantly widen the appeal of BRICS in the developing world and address the key macroeconomic imbalances in developing countries.

More generally, striking a balance between efficiency and inclusivity calls for limiting further expansion in the BRICS core in the near term, while also allowing for a wider range of partnerships and modalities of economic cooperation within the BRICS Plus format. Core expansion should remain an open possibility for economies from the BRICS "partnership belt" that demonstrate advances in economic cooperation with their partners from the BRICS Plus circle and adhere to the core values enunciated by the bloc in its expansion strategy.

Overall, greater emphasis on concrete economic initiatives (such as a trade liberalization roadmap) in BRICS' further evolution as opposed to further prioritization of core expansion would serve to re-balance the BRICS priorities towards greater pragmatism and economic effectiveness.

Finally, in the quest to achieve greater efficiency and outreach, BRICS needs to target global initiatives that address some of the most pressing global problems facing the integrational community today.

With respect to international trade, BRICS could take the lead in launching a new global trade round of the World Trade Organization (something that has not happened in decades). In the sphere of the international monetary system, it could present its vision of a more effective and stable construct that duly connects the resources and capabilities of regional financing arrangements/regional development banks with the global financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

In the end, by combining efficiency and inclusivity, the BRICS Plus platform harbours the potential to provide all countries of the Global South an opportunity to make a tangible contribution to improve the construct of the world economy.

* Yaroslav Lissovolik, founder of ‘BRICS+ Analytics’ and a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a member of the Russian International Affairs Council.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL or Independent Media.