The mainstream media portrays BRICS either with condescension or as a menace. One article calls it a marginal player; another casts it as the Western order's mortal enemy. But what if both narratives are equally false — and equally useless?
Whenever BRICS hits the international headlines, coverage swings between two poles. On one side, dismissal: "a disparate group of countries with no shared ideology, no common currency, no joint army — hence no weight at all." On the other, scaremongering: "they have united to smash the dollar, dominate the commodities markets, and build a new world order." Both make for easy headlines. Neither tells you what is actually going on.
By 2025, BRICS is no longer the original five-member bloc. In January 2024, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia joined; Indonesia followed in January 2025; and Saudi Arabia finalised its accession in 2025 — bringing full membership to 11. With the new entrants, BRICS now accounts for roughly half the world's oil reserves, about half its gas reserves, and some 46% of the global population. That scale explains its 40.7% share of global GDP on a PPP basis.
This series neither lionises nor buries BRICS. It looks at what the data actually say — and what the economic mechanics working behind those numbers leave out. We begin by dismantling three big myths.
Myth 1: "Low GDP, So It Must Be Weak"
The most common argument for writing off BRICS is nominal GDP. In dollar terms, the G7 still carves out a larger slice of the global pie than BRICS. That is true — but it is every bit as misleading as saying a country's economy is small simply because its GDP figure is lower in dollars. A dollar stretches much further in India or China than in Switzerland or Norway. On a purchasing-power-parity (PPP) basis, the real economic heft of these countries is far greater than nominal figures suggest.
Yet this is where the picture shifts. The IMF's April 2025 World Economic Outlook forecasts that, on a PPP basis, BRICS already accounts for 40.7% of global GDP, against the G7's 28.4%. In nominal terms, of course, the G7 still leads (~44% versus ~29%), but the gap is closing year by year. The BRICS average growth rate is forecast at 3.4% for 2025, against a mere 1.2% for the G7. If that trend holds — and the demographic data suggest it will — the nominal ranking will flip within a decade or two.
But there is also a deeper problem here, one that mainstream analysis rarely mentions. GDP is a deceptive indicator in its own right. If a government spends billions on an unused airport or a white-elephant stadium, that, too, adds to GDP. If loss-making state enterprises are forcibly kept alive, that, too, adds to GDP. The number does not reveal whether an investment was genuinely productive or merely poured into an empty building. It is not the size of GDP that determines a national economy's strength, but the quality of capital accumulation, the scope for market coordination, and institutional stability.
What the Numbers Show — and What They Don't
GDP — gross domestic product — is the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a country's borders in a year. The word "final" is the key: intermediate goods — those produced for further use — are not counted twice.
Nominal GDP is calculated in the local currency and converted to dollars at the market exchange rate only for comparison. PPP GDP (purchasing-power parity), by contrast, uses standardised international dollars that adjust for cross-country price-level differences — giving a more realistic picture of what the money can actually buy.
Even so, GDP remains an aggregate figure. It lumps the productive and the wasteful into the same headline number. It cannot distinguish genuine economic growth from bubbles inflated by artificial money-printing, or from wasteful state investment. A country can look "big" on paper if it builds a lot, but if those buildings stand empty, the economy has not grown stronger — only the statistics have grown prettier.
Myth 2: "No Shared Ideology, So They Will Fall Apart"
The second big myth runs like this: BRICS countries are too different — democracies and dictatorships, market economies and command systems, secular and religious states. With no shared "soul", their alliance cannot last.
This argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding: it assumes economic cooperation needs a shared worldview. In reality, the market is not a philosophy club. When a Brazilian soybean farmer sells his crop to a Chinese buyer, he does so not because he approves of China's political system, but because the deal works for both sides. We have known since David Ricardo: the engine of trade is comparative advantage — who is more efficient at what — not shared ideology.
In fact, the strength of BRICS lies precisely in not trying to impose centralised unity on its members. Unlike the EU, BRICS has no common legislature, no shared court, no single currency. It is a network, not a union. And in a network, nodes decide independently, drawing on their local knowledge — the central bureaucracy gives no orders here; at most, it coordinates.
The Knowledge Problem
In any economy, the bulk of information needed for decision-making does not sit in central databases but is dispersed across millions of local actors: the trader knows what is in demand; the worker knows what he can produce best; the consumer knows what is useful to him. The Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek argued that this local, practical knowledge can never be fully transmitted to a central bureaucracy. That is why central planning — whether in a single country or a union — always leads to distortions. BRICS can work precisely because it does not try to centrally plan its members' economies. Each country builds on its own "local knowledge", and the network merely provides the connections.
Myth 3: "The De-dollarisation Dream — or a Mortal Threat"
The third myth is the most theatrical. Some articles claim BRICS will launch a joint gold-backed currency tomorrow and the dollar will collapse. Others say it is simply impossible because no alternative to the dollar exists.
The truth, again, lies between the extremes. The data bear this out:
The dollar's share of global central-bank reserves fell from 71% in 1999 to 57.1% by Q2 2025 (IMF COFER). The World Gold Council's 2025 Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey canvassed 73 central banks, with 73% of respondents expecting the dollar's share of global reserves to be lower in five years than it is today. The central banks of BRICS members hold around 6,000 tonnes of gold between them — 17.4% of global central-bank gold stock, up from just 11.2% in 2019.
This is not speculation; it is statistics. The world is diversifying slowly but surely.
Yet BRICS is not a united front on this question. At the July 2025 Rio summit, no decision was taken on a common BRICS currency; the word "de-dollarisation" does not appear anywhere in the 126-point closing communiqué. India's commerce minister, Piyush Goyal, put it bluntly:
"It is officially on record: we do not support any BRICS currency. Imagine having a common currency with China. It is unthinkable."
— Piyush Goyal, India's commerce minister (February 2025)
Figures from Russia's finance minister, Anton Siluanov, show that in 2024 BRICS members already settled 65% of their mutual trade in their own national currencies. By March 2024, 92% of bilateral transactions between China and Russia were in yuan and ruble; by year-end, the share had risen to over 95% — according to Alexei Overchuk, Russia's deputy prime minister. That is a significant jump, but far from a revolution: the members are not using a joint BRICS currency; they are swapping their own currencies bilaterally.
De-dollarisation, then, is not a big bang but a slow, creeping process. It is not BRICS "attacking" the dollar; the dollar's dominance is eroding under its own internal tensions — and BRICS countries are exploiting that weakness to diversify.
What Is a Reserve Currency, and Why Does Gold Matter?
A reserve currency is the money central banks and governments hold as an emergency reserve. For decades this was almost exclusively the dollar, because most world trade was invoiced in dollars. When a country diversifies its reserves — by buying gold, for example — it does not necessarily mean it is "declaring war" on the dollar. Much more likely, it does not want to bet everything on a single currency in an uncertain future. Gold has no "issuer" who could devalue it under political pressure — which is why it counts as a safe haven. BRICS central banks are not rebelling against the dollar; they are reducing their own risk.
What Comes Next?
To sum up: BRICS is not marginal (it already leads in PPP terms), it will not fall apart simply because interests diverge (market logic is stronger than ideological similarity), and it is not a unified army against the dollar (but diversification is real and measurable).
The mainstream media's error is to overstate the threat from BRICS or understate its economic weight. Objective reality is more nuanced: a network whose members act independently, in their own interests, but whose combined mass is already shifting the centre of gravity of global trade and finance.
In the next instalment, we look at what gives this grouping its weight. Not political slogans, but the Earth's physical resources and the demographic energy locked within them.
- IMF World Economic Outlook (April 2025) data — official BRICS Brazil summary
- World Gold Council – Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2025
- IMF – Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves (COFER)
- Lowy Institute – A reality check for BRICS and the lofty dedollarisation agenda
- Business Today – Piyush Goyal on BRICS currency (February 2025)
- Global Times – Russia-China trade settlement in yuan and ruble (Overchuk, 2024)
- Planalto – Indonesia's full BRICS membership (January 2025)
- Friedrich A. Hayek – The Use of Knowledge in Society (The American Economic Review, 1945)