Global Influence of the BRIC Countries

The BRIC acronym was created in 2001 from the initial letters of Brazil, Russia, India and China by the Goldman Sachs experts. At that time it referred to four countries, in April 2011 the four were joined by South Africa. Since the statistical indicators for the year 2011 have not been published for all the BRICS countries yet, this paper presents data for the year 2010 and therefore without South Africa. These countries have a high economic potential and are becoming important world economic players. In the first decade of the 21st century all these countries were growing economically faster than the world economy and it is assumed that they will have overtaken the EU by the year 2020 and they will have dominated the world economy by 2030. The BRIC occupy 26% of the world's land coverage, have 2.86 billion inhabitants altogether (45% of the world's population), 1.43 billion of them belong to the economically active population, which represents 44% of the global labor force.