BRICs: The BRIC summit may have been scaled back but its significance wasn't. Chinese president Hu Jintao needed to leave early because an earthquake back home, leaving behind in Brasilia his counterparts from Brazil, Russia and India. Cutting the two-day program to just one may have suggested the emerging market leaders had little of import to discuss.
Yet China's extraordinary 11.9 per cent year-on-year growth in the first quarter underlines the economic power and increasing global importance of the four nations. That makes regular BRIC summits necessary, as the group's members form a potential counterbalance to the wealthy West.
The BRIC nations, unified in 2001 by a Goldman Sachs acronym, do not have much in common economically. Brazil and Russia mainly rely on natural resources, benefiting in the last decade from higher prices. China and India, meanwhile, have their gigantic populations providing them global scale as producers of goods and consumers of resources - assuming their economies continue to grow rapidly.
The four countries are currently the most important of the emerging markets, but that dominance may not continue. A fifth country, Indonesia, may well equal their importance in the next decade.
Their artificial association means there can sometimes be little common ground. But the 2008 crisis and subsequent recession showed how their interests sometimes collectively diverge markedly from those of the developed Western nations that currently dominate world output.
BRIC economies were badly affected by the financial crisis as trade credits dried up. Their recovery, however, has been more robust than most, and has caused a rapid rise in global commodity and energy prices. The BRIC leaders will therefore probably want to continue meeting regularly.
In crises, they may be better served by making decisions together - for their own benefit and for that of broader emerging markets, to protect their interests in what can often be a zero-sum economic world. However unconventionally this BRIC bloc came together, Western nations will need to grow accustomed to its evolving power and influence.
