What benefits does The BRICS Development Bank to its members? As you may know, a new bank called "The BRICS Development Bank" was established by the BRICS as an alternative to the World Bank. Is there a reason why they did this? What benefits could the BRICS countries get from such an arrangement?
2 Answers
The New Development Bank (formerly known as the BRICS Development Bank) has as its mission statement to support infrastructure and sustainable development.
One way of doing this is that they are building a knowledge sharing platform. They also directly solve was they see as a 'major infrastructure-financing gap', through the selling of bonds. The increased funding to solve that infrastructure gap said by them to have lifted people out of poverty.
For why the need for the new bank, its that the world bank was seen as too western. The new development bank helps to insulate and insure against the risk of another western slump such as the Eurozone crisis. It also lets the focus be on the particular needs of the developing countries, rather than in the developed. For example, in 2016 there was the effort for 60% of funding to be in renewables, which helps with the environmental issues caused in developing countries through overuse of coal.
The BRICS bank is mainly owned and controlled by China and Russia (wikipedia). And is essentially just a way for them to put up a little capital and hopefully take advantage of and reap big future rewards from small, poor, resource-rich African nations. They also get a cute name and some "international consensus" to hide behind.
China has already issued a lot of "loans" to small African countries, all of them backed by the countries' natural resources. Expect to see a lot of big, fat Chinese mines all over Africa in a few years.
And the Africans thought the Europeans were bad...
So to directly answer your question, what the BRICS member nations are getting is a smokescreen to hide behind while they use, abuse and take huge amounts of resources from poor nations.
