Broken BRICs

Collection

The Rise of the Rest

At first they were known as the BRICs -- Brazil, Russia, India, and China -- the large, rapidly growing developing states ready to remake the world economy. Now, Indonesia and others have been added to the list. But few can say if these new powers will overcome their own challenges, and more, if they will accept the current world order, or change it.

Comment

The Fall and Rise of the West

Roger C. Altman

While the grim effects of the 2008 financial crisis still resonate across the globe, the recession wasn't all bad: it triggered fundamental economic restructuring, and the result is a U.S. economy poised to emerge stronger than it was before. Although it's too soon to say with certainty, even Europe may come out ahead.

Snapshot

Unfair Trade

Amrita Narlikar and Dan Kim

Despite the claims of its champions, the fair-trade movement doesn't help alleviate poverty in developing countries. Even worse, it is just another direct farm subsidy of the kind most conscientious consumers despise. In the long term, the world needs free trade, not fair trade.

Over the past several years, the most talked-about trend in the global economy has been the so-called rise of the rest, which saw the economies of many developing countries swiftly converging with those of their more developed peers. The primary engines behind this phenomenon were the four major emerging-market countries, known as the BRICs: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. The world was witnessing a once-in-a-lifetime shift, the argument went, in which the major players in the developing world were catching up to or even surpassing their counterparts in the developed world.

These forecasts typically took the developing world's high growth rates from the middle of the last decade and extended them straight into the future, juxtaposing them against predicted sluggish growth in the United States and other advanced industrial countries. Such exercises supposedly proved that, for example, China was on the verge of overtaking the United States as the world's largest economy-a point that Americans clearly took to heart, as over 50 percent of them, according to a Gallup poll conducted this year, said they think that China is already the world's "leading" economy, even though the U.S. economy is still more than twice as large (and with a per capita income seven times as high).

As with previous straight-line projections of economic trends, however-such as forecasts in the 1980s that Japan would soon be number one economically-later returns are throwing cold water on the extravagant predictions. With the world economy heading for its worst year since 2009, Chinese growth is slowing sharply, from double digits down to seven percent or even less. And the rest of the BRICs are tumbling, too: since 2008, Brazil's annual growth has dropped from 4.5 percent to two percent; Russia's, from seven percent to 3.5 percent; and India's, from nine percent to six percent...