BRICS economies have to consolidate their partnership to play the role they deserve on the international stage

The third BRICS summit concluded on April 14 with the signing of the Sanya Declaration, highlighting the strengthening of the five-nation bloc and promoting common prosperity.

The meeting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and newly admitted South Africa (BRICS) in Sanya, Hainan province, drew worldwide attention because the five countries together account for about 40 percent of the world population and about 18 percent of GDP.

The BRICS economies have become increasingly important for the world economy not only because they overcame the impact of the global financial crisis earlier than the rest of the world, but also because they have maintained relatively rapid economic growth. Compared with the world average of 3 percent, the bloc achieved 6 percent growth last year, accounting for 60 percent of the global economic growth.

The rise of the BRICS economies is an important reason why the world economy did not go into deeper recession - akin to the Great Depression - after the global financial crisis. No wonder, the international community has hinged its hopes on the sustained and fast recovery of BRICS to propel the global economy. The high economic complementariness of the BRICS economies shows that they have huge growth potential and can be the engine of growth for the world economy.

But BRICS is still a fledging bloc, and has to strengthen its intrinsic cooperative mechanisms to play the role it deserves on the world stage. In the Sanya Declaration, the bloc has expressed its determination to transform its hopes of strengthened political cooperation into reality. To do that, the five countries have vowed to take a series of measures to strengthen mutual cooperation on a wide range of issues.

But to play a bigger role on the world stage, the BRICS economies also have to consolidate their economic relationship. For example, China is the largest trading partner of India, Brazil and South Africa, but its bilateral trade volume with the three countries is only dozens of billions of dollars. The bilateral trade volumes of India, Brazil, South Africa and Russia are even smaller. This shows that the BRICS economies have a lot of room to increase and expand mutual trade.

Besides, the five countries need to further strengthen mutual coordination on some international issues to boost the bloc's influence in the international arena. Since all the five countries are members of the United Nations Security Council this year, with China and Russia being permanent members, they have promised to closely cooperate on world peace and security initiatives, strengthen multilateralism, and promote democratization of international relations.

Since all the BRICS economies are developing countries, it is imperative that they work together to develop their bloc into a viable channel for greater South-South cooperation. The entry of South Africa into the bloc is expected to push BRICS in that direction.

Because of historical factors, many of the developing countries, including the least industrialized ones, are in Africa, which is the focus of the UN Millennium Development Goals' poverty reduction efforts. Again, South Africa's entry into the bloc is expected to build a bridge of cooperation between the bloc's other members and African countries. This is important because, according to the Sanya Declaration, the bloc is committed to helping African countries eradicate poverty and hunger, and meet the UN Millennium Development Goals' target by 2015.

As developing countries, the BRICS economies are in the same or similar development stage and face identical problems. These factors will help make the bloc not only an important platform for South-South cooperation, but also a vital South-North communication channel.

The bloc has already given an example of what its future role will be by demanding greater say and representation for emerging and developing countries in world affairs, and calling for truly multilateral international relations.

The BRICS economies have thrown their weight behind G20 to achieve that goal. Since the G20 membership is evenly distributed between developed and developing countries, both from the North and South, the BRICS economies want to turn it into the main platform for promoting international economic cooperation and more intensely pursuing better global governance, as the Sanya Declaration says.

The BRICS economies should play a bigger role in G20 and other West-dominated international financial and economic groupings, and take initiatives to change their biased rules. Their call for reforming the international financial system and efforts to participate in the making of the international financial rules are good examples of what their role should be.

On major global issues such as climate change and environmental protection, food security and renewable energy, the BRICS economies should try to assume a decision-marker's role rather than being passive participants - for only the active participation of the bloc and other developing nations will help build a more just and reasonable international political and economic order.

The author is a senior research scholar with the Center for US-China Relations at Tsinghua University.