The 2008 financial crisis was a wake-up call. It showed global investors that the West alone could no longer be trusted to deliver growth, and that a new set of economies was ready to take the baton.
The Trillion-Dollar Prize
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — grouped together by Goldman Sachs analyst Jim O’Neill as the BRICS — emerged from the crisis looking remarkably resilient. While Western economies stumbled, the BRICS kept growing at 5–6% a year, and some had posted double-digit growth in the decade before.
What makes them so attractive isn’t just the growth rate. It’s the size of the prize behind it: a rising middle class with real buying power, hungry for the goods and services that Western multinationals are struggling to sell at home. Add a young workforce, English fluency in several markets, and wages a fraction of Western levels, and it is easy to see why economists began calling this the “Trillion Dollar Prize.”
Meanwhile, the West seemed to be looking inward — debating immigration and multiculturalism, and confronting an ageing workforce sometimes described as the “shock of gray.” Relative to that backdrop, the BRICS looked ready to run.
BRICS at a Glance
| Country | Core Strength | Biggest Challenge |
|---|---|---|
| Brazil | Resource base; growing consumer class | Political instability and street protests against the elite |
| Russia | Natural resources; improving infrastructure | Political uncertainty and its actions in Ukraine |
| India | English-speaking, low-cost, youthful workforce | Corruption, policy paralysis and patchy infrastructure |
| China | World-class infrastructure; manufacturing scale | Opaque banking system and rising credit risk |
| South Africa | English fluency; decent infrastructure base | Unfinished post-apartheid economic integration |
BRICS in 2026: From Five to Eleven
The BRICS story didn’t stop at five countries. Since 2024, the bloc has roughly doubled in size, admitting Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the UAE and, most recently, Indonesia as full members. A further batch of applicants — more than twenty countries at last count, spanning Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia — is queuing up for consideration, and India is hosting the next summit in New Delhi in September 2026 to weigh several of those applications.
The New Development Bank, the group’s homegrown lender, has kept pace with this growth. It has approved roughly $43 billion across more than 130 projects in energy, transport, water and climate-linked infrastructure, and it has also been quietly adding members — Bangladesh, Algeria, Colombia, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe among them — who tap the bank without joining the wider political bloc.
How the Bloc Has Grown
| Wave | Members |
|---|---|
| Founding five | Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa |
| 2024–25 intake | Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the UAE, taking the bloc to nine full members |
| 2025–26 intake | Indonesia joins as the tenth full member; a further applicant pool of more than twenty countries, including several from Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia, is under review |
| NDB-only members | Bangladesh, Algeria, Colombia, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe have joined the New Development Bank without taking up full BRICS membership |
A recurring theme in the expansion is currency diversification rather than a wholesale break from the dollar. Members are increasingly settling bilateral trade in local currencies — rupees, yuan, roubles — and linking up payment systems so that transfers depend less on any single financial network. Indian officials have been careful to frame this as reducing concentration risk rather than staging a dramatic de-dollarization, and no common BRICS currency exists as of 2026. Still, for investors the direction of travel is clear: the group is building more of its own financial plumbing every year, which changes the calculus for anyone financing projects in these markets.
Not Victims of Globalization — Beneficiaries of It
There’s a popular narrative that globalization caused the 2008 crash and that an integrated world economy is now a discredited idea. The BRICS experience tells a different story.
Rather than retreating from global capital the way parts of the West did, these economies leaned into it. Instead of becoming victims of over-integration, they positioned themselves as beneficiaries — courting investment rather than turning it away, even while managing very real domestic problems.
India is the clearest example. A series of reforms nicknamed “Big Bang Friday” opened the retail and aviation sectors to foreign direct investment and cut back subsidies. None of these moves solved every structural problem, but they signalled a government still reform-minded and still hungry for global capital.
Two Ways to Respond to a Crisis
| Dimension | Victim Approach (the West, post-2008) | Beneficiary Approach (BRICS) |
|---|---|---|
| Capital | Retrenchment; capital stays home | Rolls out the red carpet for foreign capital |
| Consumer behaviour | Higher saving, lower spending | Expanding middle class driving new demand |
| Policy stance | Debate over multiculturalism and immigration | Reform pushes such as India’s opening of retail and aviation to FDI |
| Demographics | Ageing workforce, the “shock of gray” | Youthful population, the demographic dividend |
Why the BRICS Keep Attracting Capital
- A demographic dividend — a young population able to absorb investment for decades to come.
- Infrastructure build-out, led by China, with Russia, India and the others racing to catch up.
- Economies that are far from saturated, leaving more room to grow than mature Western markets.
- A widening knowledge-economy base, with India furthest along and Russia, China and South Africa closing the gap.
- Voracious consumption of resources and finished goods, opening large, relatively untapped markets for multinational goods.
- A growing menu of financing options — the New Development Bank now sits alongside traditional Western lenders, giving investors and borrowers alike another route into these markets.
The Other Side of the Ledger: Real Challenges
None of this is a free lunch. Each BRICS economy carries baggage that tempers the optimism.
- China: no globally accepted framework for arbitration and dispute resolution, plus an opaque banking system and production data that deserves scepticism.
- India: high levels of corruption, slow project clearances, patchy infrastructure outside the major cities, and a stretch of policy paralysis.
- Russia and Brazil: political instability and mass protests against entrenched elites, layered on top of persistent corruption.
- South Africa: unfinished business from apartheid, with many feeling that the post-apartheid gains have gone to a small elite rather than the majority.
The Road Ahead
Currency wobbles in India, credit-market stress in China, and the end of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s easy-money era have all tested the BRICS story in recent times. Even so, the macroeconomic fundamentals remain fundamentally sound.
The bigger, structural point still stands: rather than being victims of globalization, the BRICS have used it to their advantage, and that is precisely what makes them the next frontier — for investors and for the future shape of the global economy alike.
With the bloc now eleven members strong, its own development bank scaling up, and New Delhi preparing to host the next round of expansion talks in September 2026, the BRICS story looks less like a post-crisis footnote and more like a permanent fixture of how global capital will be allocated for the next decade.
