BRICS Not Aiming to Confront Other Blocs, Create New Cold War – Ex-World Bank Official

WASHINGTON, August 31 (Sputnik) – The expansion of BRICS is not aimed at confronting other trade blocs or to create a Cold War type of standoff between countries, former executive director of the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank Rogerio Studart told Sputnik.

“I don’t like the narrative that… this is a bloc that is expanding to confront another bloc,” Studart said. “I think it’s much more complex. We have a collective failure in addressing the most important issues that we have in front of us, from inequality, geopolitical issues, climate change, poverty, that is, for me, the heart of the problem, not that we have two blocs trying to establish another Cold War or something like that.”

Studart adds that he is hopeful the BRICS expansion is going to lead to better cooperation in the international community because the world is too much in trouble when it comes to inequality, climate change, and geopolitical tensions.

“The main problem is that the multilateral system has been failing countries for too many years,” Studart said. “The IMF [International Monetary Fund], the World Bank, they have not responded in the way that many countries would have expected, particularly after the 2009 [financial] crisis.”

The creation of the BRICS itself was a response to frustrations over the shortcomings of multilateral institutions, developed to provide the capacity to accommodate different interests of those countries, particularly emerging market nations, Studart said.

Last week, the BRICS group of major emerging economies – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – announced that its membership is more than doubling. Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Saudi Arabia were invited to join the group; their membership will take effect on January 1, 2024.