Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
This is all very remarkable considering the histories and status of these five countries—Brazil, Russia,
India, China, and South Africa, hence the acronym BRICS—in fairly recent history. It was not so long ago
that Brazil was a sputtering “third world” economy ruled largely by military dictators until democracy re-
turned in 1989.
Russia—technically the Russian Federation—emerged from the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, the
bitter Cold War antagonist of the United States and Western Europe. Adopting a new constitution in 1993,
Russia was still beset by widespread corruption, political turmoil from independence movements and stark
economic difficulties largely the result of little investment under decades of Communist rule that saw a
large portion of its economy poured into its military. But the nation once feared for the tanks and armies
displayed in Moscow's May Day parades or rolling through captive Eastern bloc nations, and for the mis-
siles it once tried to place in Cuba and aimed at the West, Russia was now being watched for the power it
wielded through control of enormous natural resources and a new generation of Russian capitalists ready
to assert the role of the world's largest nation in the new global economy.
India, among the most ancient of the world's civilizations, had long been the poster child of starving,
undeveloped countries. But fueled by technology and a growing middle class that prized education, India,
with its billion-plus population, was transformed into an economic giant at the beginning of the twenty-
first century.
China, in 2010, overtook Japan as the world's second-largest economy—a stunning development for a
nation that was poor and backward for much of the last half of the twentieth century. By 2010, half of the
world's ten largest banks were Chinese. (What Chairman Mao, China's authoritarian Marxist leader, would
make of this development is an extraordinary thought to ponder.) China also surpassed the United States as
the world's top energy consumer. Chinese factories were humming and newly minted Chinese consumers
wanted to buy their own cars. Lots of them. In
The World Is Flat
, Thomas Friedman reports that during
a visit to Beijing in 2004, he learned that the people of that city alone were buying thirty thousand cars
a
month
. China is now also one of the world leaders in the dubious category of creating traffic jams and air
pollution.
The BRICS group grew out of the earlier gathering of Brazil, Russia, India, and China, the so-called
BRIC nations, a phrase coined by a prominent investment banker in a 2001 paper that forecast the growing
power of these four nations. In 2010, South Africa, once an international pariah because of its apartheid
policies, joined the group. Condemned by much of the world for its racist political and cultural policies,
South Africa was transformed in 1990 when the apartheid laws were dismantled. In 1994, Nelson Man-
dela, freed earlier from a South African jail, became the country's first black president.
The 2012 New Delhi meeting of the BRICS nations was a flexing of their growing economic muscle.
Representing nearly three billion people, these five countries have enjoyed generally fast-growing eco-
nomies, and aspire to have more say in the global financial system long dominated by the United States
and Europe. Part of that effort involves their desire to reform the International Monetary Fund and the pro-
cess for selecting the World Bank's president. Which brings us to the next question . . .
Does the World Bank Have ATMs?
In the waning days of World War II, the forty-four Allied nations sent delegates to a financial conference
at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire. The goal of the more than seven hun-
dred delegates to the Bretton Woods Conference, as it was called, was as lofty as nearby Mt. Washington,
highest peak in the Northeast United States (6,288 feet; 1,917 meters). They were there to attempt to sta-
bilize the world's financial and currency markets after the devastating war.
