A spatial shift is taking place in the world economy whose global implications-economic, political, military- are going to be hugely significant, and environmental ones may be catastrophic if corrective action is not taken. The traditionally dominant economies of US, EU, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, though still important players in the global economy, are witnessing their relative decline. In contrast, the hitherto less developed economies are rising in importance. A coherent bloc in these emerging economies has come to be known as BRICS (Brazil, Russian, India, China and South Africa). Although there is another bloc MINT (Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey) that finds mention in the development literature, it is BRICS that has concretely emerged as a workable bloc. The announcement about the setting of a BRICS bank at the Brazil summit, the sixth and the most important of all the BRICS summits so far, are a significant step in the direction of concretising the bloc’s identity. Comparable data on the share of each country’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the global GDP from the 1980s onwards reveals the nature of the global spatial shift taking place. US GDP as a share of world GDP in 1980 was 22.6%, had gone up to as high as 23.3% in 2000 (nearly one forth of the entire world’s GDP), declined to 18.6% in 2011 in the wake of the global financial crisis, and according to the latest IMF data (2014), it has gone down to 16.28%. In contrast with that, China’s GDP share in the global GDP was merely 2% in 1980 and has now shot up phenomenally to 16.47%. As a result, China by occupying number one position in the global economy in terms of its share in the global GDP has relegated US to number two position. India’s number in this league table is three and Japan, which was number three until 2011 when its place was taken by India, would be number four. This is a huge change of historical significance. About 34 years ago, two developing countries (China and India) that were, more or less, non-entities in the global economic league, have now reached the top of that league.
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