金砖四国在经济上的重要作用

Teeming with people, on the brink of leading the world economy in terms of growth are the countries known as BRIC: Brazil, Russia, India, and China, together 40 percent of the world's population, a quarter of the land mass. Together their GDP is 2/3 that of the United States.

This is the fastest growing group of countries among the emerging markets. They have withstood through the financial crisis very well, and they're contributing a great deal to world growth.

Brazil's Lula da Silva, Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, India's Manmohan Singh, and China's Hu Jintao met at the BRIC Summit last June in Yekaterinburg, Russia. According to the Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs which coined the term BRIC, these will be the fastest growing emerging markets. China already is the world's manufacturing center, and holds some $800 billion in US debt. India's economy is expected to surpass the US by 2050 as its population grows by an estimated 700 million people. Russia and Brazil have important commodities such as oil. Yet some experts point out their differences, casting doubt on their ability to coordinate policy. For example, Russia is diminishing in economic power, while China and India are gaining. Brazil and Russia benefit from high commodity prices, while China and India, manufacturing countries, do not.

(These) countries don't perform the same way, and they don't do the same thing. Their economic structures are completely different. It's not a very good grouping. That's said if you are gonna talk about important countries, China is about as important a partner of the US in economic terms as there is; and India is rising in importance as US's economic partner. So they are important countries within the BRIC grouping, but the BRIC grouping itself doesn't mean anything.

Eswar Prasad at Brookings agrees the differences are important in terms of shaping policy.

All of them are keen to engage with the US, but on their own terms. They certainly do have very different goals and objectives. So the US is going to have a strategy of engaging with each of them individually, not just as a group.