By IANS,
New Delhi : Academics and experts from the five emerging economies — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — will meet here for a three-day discussion starting Sunday to draw up the agenda for the fourth BRICS summit to be held here March-end.
More than 50 scholars from the five BRICS countries will take part in the 4th BRICS Academic Forum meeting being hosted by Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based public policy think tank.
Sudhir Vyas, secretary (economic affairs) in the external affairs ministry, will deliver the keynote address Monday.
India will host the BRICS summit for the first time since the leaders’ meeting was first held in the Russian city of Yekaterinburg in 2009. The theme for the New Delhi summit is “BRICS Partnership for Stability, Security and Growth”.
The fourth BRICS summit will focus on ways to deal with the festering global economic downturn and make a renewed pitch for reforming the global governance architecture.
“BRICS nations can play a much bigger role in the world management by systematically creating frameworks offering policy and development options for the emerging and developing world and assume the role of a veritable policy think tank for such nations,” the ORF said in a statement ahead of the forum meeting.
This BRICS policy think tank could be similar to the role played by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the 20th-century world.
“BRICS must now move on from being a grouping of individual nations, discussing agendas, to becoming “a go-to” institution for setting regional and global agendas. The Fourth BRICS Academic Forum meeting will attempt to address these imperatives,” said the ORF.
The BRICS has evolved into a powerful grouping of the world’s leading emerging economies that, according to an estimate, accounts for nearly half the world’s population, 30 percent of global landmass, 18 percent of global GDP and 35 percent of global foreign exchange reserves.
The fourth BRICS summit is expected to come out with an ambitious agenda that will focus on managing the global economic crisis, reform of international institutions of governance and an increased focus on developmental issues that includes food security, energy security, public health, science and technology and urbanisation.
The summit of the leaders of BRICS countries will be preceded by the Business Forum comprising trade ministers of the rapidly growing economies of the five countries.
Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill coined the term BRIC in 2001 to denote the four fastest-growing emerging economies of the world. Since then, BRIC evolved into a multilateral grouping with the first summit in 2009 held at the peak of the global financial recession. Pretoria joined the BRIC, changing the nomenclature of the grouping to BRICS, only in April 2011 at the Sanya summit in China.