Global Economy, Bric | featured news

Leaders of the five BRICS nations fueling global economic growth plan the creation of a development bank in a direct challenge to the World Bank that they accuse of Western bias.

Brazil has had a tough two years. This last one in particular has been rough. A crime wave swept Sao Paulo, the nation’s largest city, towards the end of the year. But more importantly, a country that wants to be the country of the future, with all the amenities and a stable economy, has seen its confidence dwindle a bit. This is not the Lula years, in reference to popular president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. The nation that will hold the FIFA World Cup in just two short years and later the Summer Olympics in 2016 is scratching its collective heads. How did Brazil go from one of the biggest economies in Latin America, to be usurped by Mexico now as measured by investor appetite and losing the No. 6 global economy position to the U.K. in less than a 12 months.

The Indian economy is likely to have grown at 5.5 % in the July-September quarter, posing a "difficult situation," the country's federal finance minister, P. Chidambaram, said Saturday. "When growth declines to 5.5% as it has in the first quarter [April-June] of this financial year and when the growth is likely to be around 5.5% in the second quarter of this financial year, it goes without saying we are facing a difficult situation," Mr. Chidambaram told a bankers' conference in the Western Indian city of Pune.

A gauge of manufacturing activity in China rose slightly in September but remained in contractionary territory for the 11th consecutive month, indicating that the world's second-largest economy is still slowing.

The global economy is in the worst shape since the dark days of 2009. Six of the 17 countries that use the euro currency are in recession. The U.S. economy is struggling again. And the economic superstars of the developing world - China, India and Brazil - are in no position to come to the rescue. They're slowing, too.

The economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China account for 20 percent of the world economic output, and rising. That’s up four fold in the last decade, according to a report released yesterday by the International Monetary Fund. Despite the growth, problems in the core economies had made the post-2008 world a difficult one for the big four emerging markets.

The Indian government plans to take steps to boost exports and increase dollar inflows to give a much-need lift to the economy and arrest the slide in the Indian rupee, a senior official from the finance ministry said Saturday.

For a country that’s faced the worst economic recession in a generation, the U.S. is doing marvelously well by comparison to every major economy except for maybe China. GDP growth, still around 2 percent and expected to end the year close to that, is better in the U.S. than it is in Brazil, a country which grew China-style in 2010 at 7.5 percent. Once the shining start of the Latin American economies, Brazil is now at stall speed.

India’s problems have dampened hopes that it, along with China and other non-Western economies, might help revive global growth.