Grimes Interviewed on the Challenges Facing BRICS
William Grimes, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, was recently interviewed on the the impact of the BRICS countries on the new international economic order as well as the challenges the BRICS countries currently face.
Grimes was quoted in a September 12, 2017 article by Sina entitled “China Will Become The Leader of the BRICS Mechanism.“
From the text of the article:
“I do not think that the BRICS countries as a unit have had much effect on global governance. However, there has clearly been a major expansion of the role of China, India, and (to a lesser extent) Brazil in global governance. This can be seen in their role in international trade agreements, international organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, and greater prominence in the UN system. In the case of China, its efforts in institution-building (including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization) as well as its economic and connectivity impact through its trade and investment networks as well as the Belt and Road Initiative are also substantial, and are significantly reshaping the broad regional order.”
“China and Brazil are facing the “middle income challenge,” in which increases in factors (labor, capital) alone are insufficient to maintain rapid economic growth. However, both have positive growth prospects given their levels of income. For India, Brazil, and South Africa, infrastructure is a major challenge, as is mass education. Both will hamper equitable growth. Russia’s challenges are different – they include lack of industrial base, excessive dependence on resource extraction by oligopolistic companies, crony capitalism, and depopulation.”
Grimes, who has taught at Boston University since 1996, is a leading scholar of East Asian financial regionalism. His 2008 book Currency and Contest in East Asia: The Great Power Politics of Financial Regionalism won the 2010 Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize and received Honorable Mention for the 2009 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award. More recently, in conjunction with the Pardee School’s Global Economic Governance Initiative, he led a research project for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) to develop a guide to best practices for regional liquidity arrangements.