What BRICS is and how it works

The acronym came before the group

The label was published on 30 November 2001, in Global Economics Paper No. 66, "Building Better Global Economic BRICs", written at Goldman Sachs. It was a projection about four economies rather than a record of anything those four had agreed, and none of them had asked for it.

They met as leaders under the label at Yekaterinburg on 16 June 2009, and the joint statement issued there opens on somebody else: its first numbered paragraph stresses the central role of the G20 summits in dealing with the financial crisis, and its second calls for the decisions taken at the G20 summit in London on 2 April 2009 to be carried out. The Sanya Declaration of 14 April 2011 welcomed South Africa into the group, so the last letter of the acronym came from a country that had not been in the paper at all.

What stands in place of a treaty

There is no charter, no permanent staff and no seat. The chair rotates, the summit meets once a year, and the year's work is a declaration adopted by consensus. Membership is recorded in those declarations and nowhere else. The Johannesburg II Declaration of 23 August 2023 decided to invite Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to become full members from 1 January 2024. The Rio de Janeiro Declaration of 6 July 2025 welcomed Indonesia as a member, in one clause of one sentence.

An invitation issued that way can also go unanswered, and nothing obliges an answer. Of the six countries named in the Johannesburg paragraph, four are on this catalogue's roster for the group.

Little else here is shared. Of every group this catalogue tracks, the United Nations is the only other one that every member of BRICS also belongs to. Eight of them are in the World Trade Organization; Ethiopia and Iran are not.

Two treaties, one day

What the group has built rests on signature in the ordinary way, and both instruments were signed at Fortaleza on 15 July 2014.

The Agreement on the New Development Bank gave the bank an initial subscribed capital of 50 billion United States dollars against an authorised capital of 100 billion, distributed equally among the five founding members, with each member's voting power equal to its subscribed shares. Article 3 puts the headquarters in Shanghai, and the annexed articles of agreement put the first regional office in Johannesburg. The agreement entered into force for the founders on 3 July 2015.

The Treaty for the Establishment of a BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement was signed the same day. It committed 100 billion United States dollars against short-term balance of payments pressure and divided the commitment unequally: China 41 billion, Brazil, Russia and India 18 billion each, South Africa 5 billion. Nothing moves on signature. Each party keeps ownership and possession of what it has committed until a request is made, acceded to by the others, and effected through a currency swap. Read beside the bank agreement, the pair is a study in what the members would and would not hold in equal shares.

The bank's list is not the group's list

Membership of the New Development Bank is open to any member of the United Nations, and the two lists came apart almost at once. Bangladesh joined the bank on 16 September 2021 and has never been in the group. The United Arab Emirates joined on 4 October 2021, more than two years before the invitation that brought it into BRICS took effect. Egypt followed on 20 February 2023, Algeria on 19 May 2025 and Uzbekistan on 5 June 2026. Ethiopia is in the group and is still carried by the bank as prospective, admitted by the Board of Governors and waiting on the deposit of its instrument of accession. Colombia and Uruguay sit on that same prospective list without belonging to the group at all.

Partners, which are not members

The Kazan Declaration of 23 October 2024 endorsed the Modalities of the BRICS Partner Country Category, a status short of membership that had been commissioned in the same Johannesburg paragraph as the enlargement. The Rio declaration of the following year named Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Nigeria, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Uganda and Uzbekistan as partner countries, attending ministerial and technical meetings under the chair's programme. The catalogue files none of them under this group, and the figures on this page count members only.

Where the membership is argued

Because nothing is deposited and nothing is ratified, there is no instrument to consult on who belongs, and published counts of the membership differ. The disagreement is mostly about Saudi Arabia, which was named in the Johannesburg invitation of 23 August 2023 and has taken part in meetings since, and which the declarations have not recorded as a member in the terms they used for Indonesia in 2025. This catalogue's roster does not file it under the group, and the table below follows the roster. Argentina, named in the same sentence in 2023, has not appeared as a member in any declaration since.

The name has stopped describing the membership as well. Five initials were fixed by an outside analyst in 2001 and adopted by their owners in 2009 and 2011. The roster has been longer since 1 January 2024, and the letters have not moved.