AILSA CHANG, HOST:
BRICS has drawn the ire of President Trump. That's the economic alliance that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. And this week, Trump called BRICS, quote, "anti the United States." Adrian Ma and Darian Woods over at The Indicator talked to Jim O'Neill, the economist who coined the acronym BRICS, and they discussed his vision.
ADRIAN MA, BYLINE: The closest analogy to what BRICS is and what it's trying to achieve would be the G7.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Jim O'Neill says, when he was working in banking in the 1980s, the G7 was really important.
JIM O'NEILL: They would deal with major macroeconomic imbalances, which, of course, in those days, were dominated just by those seven countries.
WOODS: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S. - but that changed in 1997, when a financial crisis spread throughout Southeast Asia.
O'NEILL: The Asian crisis effectively really came to an end because of China.
MA: Among other things, China contributed over $4 billion to help bail out other Asian countries.
O'NEILL: I read that as, actually, the U.S. isn't the only guys on the block.
WOODS: Jim starts extrapolating the economic growth trajectory of Brazil, of Russia, of India and China. Back in 2000, these countries made up only about 23% of the world economy, accounting for differences in purchasing power. Jim's calculations show that this share would grow to 27% over the next 10 years. And so based on this growth path, he thinks these countries should have more of a place at the table of global governance.
O'NEILL: And it seemed, to me, somewhat crazy. What is the point of having Germany, France and Italy continuously singularly represented as nations in all these structures that were developed 50-odd years earlier?
MA: He proposes changing the G7. He wants to consolidate the European countries and add China and other BRIC countries.
WOODS: So the counterargument is often, well, these countries are authoritarian - in the case of China and Russia, less so India and Brazil - and the values of these countries in the post-World War II institutions are important.
O'NEILL: This sort of very sort of, to be honest, almost patronizing but certainly simplistic view - you can only run the world with people that think exactly like us - is partly why we're in the mess that we're in.
WOODS: Building off other similar forums developed in the 1990s, the first BRIC meeting happens in New York in 2006, alongside the U.N. Assembly, with the first formal summit in Russia in 2009.
MA: Since then, BRICS countries have proposed building alternative bank payment systems. They've also investigated potentially creating a common currency or some way to settle international trade without using the dollar so much. This is one of the things that got Donald Trump so worked up.
WOODS: Do you see BRICS as an anti-American project?
O'NEILL: So I find it hilarious when I observe Donald Trump making comments about the BRICS. And I think just simply by making these comments, as the president of the United States, effectively he is boosting the importance of the BRICS alliance.
MA: Ultimately, though, a separate BRICS forum was not what Jim was aiming for.
O'NEILL: I wish that wouldn't have happened because you have the G7 and the BRICS sort of doing their own thing in parallel and both trying to sort of project their images about how they can solve all these issues, which neither of them is important enough on their own to do so.
MA: Adrian Ma.
WOODS: Darian Woods, NPR News.
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