Vladimir Putin has been looking forward to this week. On Tuesday, the
Russian president will welcome leaders from the BRICS bloc of emerging
market economies in a show of defiance to U.S. and European attempts to
make him a global pariah. BRICS was once a group of just five
countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—that has
expanded to officially include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United
Arab Emirates. Moscow says 32 countries will participate in this year’s
summit in Kazan, Russia.
As FP’s Keith Johnson writes,
though Western capitals dismiss the group as a grab bag of countries,
“it is hard to appreciate just how much resentment there is of Western
hypocrisy and hegemony, all mortar helping to bond the loose membership
of BRICS.” The BRICS countries can be said to represent a desire for an
alternate global order. It is probably not a coincidence that the summit
is not only being held in Russia but is also taking place as two
Bretton Woods institutions—the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
World Bank—hold their fall meetings in Washington.
“In recent years … the IMF has diverged from its obligation to support
countries in need,” write Andrés Arauz and Ivana Vasic-Lalovic of the
Center for Economic and Policy Research. In their Argument “The IMF Has Lost Its Way,”
the economists offer what they call “five quick fixes” to move the IMF
out of its old ways—austerity and conditionality—and into sync with a
changed world confronting a climate emergency.
Meanwhile, the World Bank has lulled itself into a complacent belief
that what it was doing was working, Oxford University’s Paul Collier
writes in “The World Bank Is Failing And Needs a Restart.”
If current trends continue, “the global poverty count will soon revert
to its grim pre-1990 upward March,” he argues, adding that the prospect
of rising poverty “should be galvanizing the bank into action.”—The Editors
https://link.foreignpolicy.com/view/644279f41a7f1f1e29de6831m4g1r.drq/142d08be