The BRICS Summit will address billion-dollar initiatives aimed at advancing its five members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
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In recent years, India and China have further expanded their economic and trade cooperation and made steady progress in cooperation in such areas as science and technology, outer space and infrastructure, Modi said.
“Despite some disappointments in some of the BRIC economies, led by China and India, their collective weight in global GDP continues to rise and therefore also does their importance”, said Jim O’Neill, the ex- Goldman Sachs Group chief economist who coined the acronym back in 2001, without South Africa.
Russia’s Bashkortostan is hosting the seventh Brics summit and the 15th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in capital Ufa where around 10,000 visitors are expected during the two back-to-back summits.
“I’ve started the process of consulting with our own development bank partners, in fact I was having meetings just now, to hire one-two-three people from each of the countries”, he said.
Russian Federation has been hit by Western sanctions over its role in the Ukraine crisis, measures that limited access to foreign financing for many large firms and banks, such as the state oil company Rosneft, private gas producer Novatek and Russia’s biggest bank, Sberbank.
“Last year, we opened actually a new page in Dushanbe in the relations between our states and launched a mechanism of three-party meetings at the highest level on the initiative of the Mongolian president”, Putin said.
Modi also proposed an annual BRICS trade fair, and said India could host the first such event.
“On Thursday its finance minister said China had bought around $1 billion worth of Russian domestic bonds this year”, reported Reuters.
Critics however say that while the summit is symbolically important for Russian Federation, Brics is not a strong political force due to the very different agendas and priorities of its members.
He said the New Development Bank should not be viewed as a tool to help sanctions-hit companies but that it would look at requests from Russian firms.
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“We have mechanism of counter-terrorism consultation between the two ministries” in which it can be discussed, he had said. She added that several other documents will be adopted to regulate the operation of governing bodies – the Governing Council and the Standing Committee.
