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10 October, 2013Emerging Markets World Bank editions, October 2013
A leading Chinese diplomat has called for closer ties among the BRICS nations and the formation of a secretariat among them – a degree of formalization some distance from the catchy acronym that originally bracketed them together.
Zhou Xiaoming, who is Minister Counsellor Economic & Commercial at the Chinese embassy for the UK and who has held senior positions in the Ministry of Foreign Trade, among other places, told Emerging Markets: “A secretariat would make the BRICS more efficient. Most, if not all, international organizations have a secretariat to look after the business when leaders are busy with other things.”
Zhou was speaking at a London conference called innovaBRICS, in which representatives of several constituent nations called for greater cooperation, particularly as all five (if South Africa is counted) have run into considerable headwinds around growth models, governance, deficits, government interference or a combination of several of them.
“The BRICS story is not that, once the economic cycles go through some kind of dip, that the narrative must now become one of winning completely or losing completely,” said Pravin Gordhan, Minister of Finance of South Africa. “Economic cycles will go through their rhythms, but I’m confidence the BRICS countries, and certainty the BRICS formation, has a lot to offer both the members of BRICS and the globe as well.” He said he believed that a mooted new development bank for the BRICS countries “hopefully comes into place when the leaders meet in Brazil next year in March,” alongside a new contingency reserve the five countries are working on in order to absorb financial shocks in future.
Zhou said that BRICS had “come a long way since Mr O’Neill first developed the concept” and that “the academic concept has been turned into an organization. The BRICS is increasingly institutionalized, with an evolving mechanism to cooperate and coordinate.” He said that ministers in foreign affairs, trade, finance and agriculture, as well as central bank governors, now meet regularly. “BRICS has evolved into a decision-making body,” he said.
Roberto Jaguaribe, Brazilian Ambassador to the UK and Northern Ireland, and a participant in early BRICS talks, noted the increasing political heft of the group but denied that there was any intention to be confrontational with that power. “Many people believe the BRICS were generated to create a certain opposition to the G7,” he said. “That was never the intention.” He commented, though, that it had become common for meetings to take place between, for example, the BRICS Ministers collectively and the US Secretary of the Treasury. Jaguaribe called for common standards of governance among the five nations, arguing this was the greatest need for convergence.
Any formal establishment of a secretariat would raise a number of questions, the most obvious being: which country would host it? And if a neutral party, which one? In the meantime, many of the nations are more worried about a new acronym, BIITS, for Brazil, India, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa – a term linking the countries not for their growth potential, but their worrying trade and fiscal deficits.
