The inventor of BRICS has a message for ‘lazy, colonial’ Europe—India and China are still not taken seriously enough on the world stage

Twenty-five years ago, the unassumingly titled Goldman Sachs Economics Paper No: 66 changed the way business leaders looked at the world.

Its author was Jim O’Neill, one of the bank’s leading economists who would become head of Goldman’s Asset Management division in 2010, where he oversaw $800 billion of clients’ money.

O’Neill and his team of economists and analysts had alighted on a new, emerging market trend—four countries that would play an outsized role in the world economy.

Brazil, Russia, India, and China (which accounted for less than 10% of global GDP at the time) would be the new power houses, growing far more rapidly than the mature economies of the West.

The BRICs acronym stuck, although O’Neill now jokes that it might have been better to call the group “ICs”, given Russia’s warring tendencies and economic woes and Brazil’s regular bouts of political turmoil.

“Economically, 25 years later, BRICS has become utterly dependent on the ‘ICs’,” O’Neill told me.

“China and India have surpassed the numbers that we showed could happen.

Brazil and Russia actually, after the first great decade—their share of global GDP is back to where it was when I dreamt the name up.” For India and China, the growth numbers are remarkable.

Figures compiled by Fulcrum Asset Management reveal that India’s cumulative, per capita growth since 2000 totaled 246%.

China’s hit 554%.

During the same period the figures for the U.S., the European continent and the U.K. are, in order, 45%, 30% and 29%.

China’s growth is still outstripping the West.

But O’Neill says that it is India that has the demographic wind in its sails.

“This is India’s moment in the sun because of its demographics.” he said.