On 12 and 13 September 2026, leaders from eleven BRICS members, together with a wide cast of partner and outreach countries, gathered in New Delhi for the bloc’s 18th summit, closing out India’s year-long chairship under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.”[1] The summit produced the New Delhi Declaration, a 140-point consensus text unanimously adopted on its first day[2] and covering everything from UN Security Council reform to artificial intelligence governance.[3]
Beneath the geopolitical headlines, however, there exists a narrower and more testable question, one with relevance well beyond the eleven member states: can this kind of summit diplomacy actually move the needle on growth for the Global South, or does it mostly produce carefully worded reports that struggle to survive contact with national interest? Early reporting on the Declaration already hints at the answer being more interesting than either extreme. Alongside the familiar language on multilateral reform, the text devotes real space to unglamorous plumbing (payments, trade documentation, MSME finance, supply chains, critical minerals), the sort of infrastructure that decides whether firms can actually trade across borders rather than merely talk about doing so.[4]
India came to the summit with a particular stake in the answer. New Delhi has consistently supported greater representation for emerging economies in global institutions while remaining deeply connected to Western markets, investment and technology, and its 2026 chairship leaned into practical economic cooperation rather than confrontation with the existing order, positioning itself as a bridge-builder for the wider Global South rather than as the leader of a rival bloc.[5] That framing matters for how the Declaration’s trade content should be read: it was drafted by a chair with an explicit interest in showing that BRICS cooperation can be additive to, rather than a substitute for, the trading relationships its members already have with the advanced economies.
This insight analyses that question by combining three strands of evidence: the academic literature on what economic and trade diplomacy is actually known to do for developing-country trade, i.e., the substantive economic content of the New Delhi Declaration itself, and the trade and growth data that allow us to judge whether two decades of BRICS cooperation have shifted the underlying trading relationship among Global South economies, rather than just the rhetoric surrounding it. The argument that follows is not that trade diplomacy is irrelevant to growth, the evidence against that position being fairly strong, but that its pay-off is conditional, uneven across members, and still some distance short of matching the ambition of the language used to describe it.
The next section reviews what the literature says about trade diplomacy’s effect on developing-country growth. The insight then situates the summit within a Global South growth outlook that the IMF and World Bank both describe in unusually stark terms, before examining the Declaration’s trade-relevant content, testing the resulting optimism against two decades of intra-BRICS trade data, and closing with the structural constraints that will determine whether New Delhi’s commitments survive the journey home.
Trade Diplomacy and Growth: What the Literature Tells Us
Economic diplomacy is usually defined in the academic literature as the deliberate use of government instruments such as embassies, export promotion agencies, state visits, trade missions, multilateral coalitions, etc., to shape the conditions under which firms trade and invest across borders.[6] This is a narrower claim than it might sound. It does not assert that diplomacy creates trade out of nothing; rather, it argues that diplomacy lowers the information costs, political-risk premiums and search costs that otherwise deter firms, particularly smaller ones, from entering unfamiliar markets. Using a gravity model covering sixty-three importing and exporting countries, Yakop and van Bergeijk (2011) found that economic diplomacy had a measurable, positive effect on bilateral trade flows, an effect that held even after controlling for the usual gravity variables of distance, size and existing trade ties.[7]
The more policy-relevant finding, for a summit built around Global South participants, is that this effect is not uniform across the income spectrum. Van Bergeijk et al. (2010), examining export promotion agencies and diplomatic networks specifically, found that commercial diplomacy adds little to trade between two OECD economies (firms in rich countries generally already have the information and legal certainty they need) but is significantly trade-enhancing in the bilateral relationships of developing countries, where those frictions are larger to begin with.[8] In other words, the diplomacy of the kind practised at a BRICS summit should, in theory, matter more for its Global South participants than an equivalent G7 gathering would for its own members.
A related literature stresses that this is not only a matter of governments smoothing the way for private firms. Developing countries have, over the past two decades, become trading partners for one another on a scale that would have been unusual in the 1990s, and economic diplomacy between Global South governments increasingly serves to build the political trust on which such South-South deals depend.[9] That framing is directly relevant to New Delhi: a BRICS summit is, among other things, a mechanism for eleven Global South governments to signal to one another, and to prospective investors, that a given trade or investment relationship carries acceptable political risk.
None of this implies that more diplomatically facilitated trade automatically means more growth. Zahonogo’s (2016) study of forty-two sub-Saharan African economies between 1980 and 2012 is a useful corrective here: trade openness raises growth, but only up to a threshold, beyond which the relationship bends downward, an inverted-U, or what the paper calls a Laffer curve of trade.[10] Where that threshold sits, and whether an economy is on the rising or falling side of it, depends on complementary factors largely outside the reach of any single summit declaration: the depth of domestic financial markets, the quality of institutions, and an economy’s capacity to reallocate resources toward the sectors that an opening in trade actually rewards. Put together, the literature converges on a conditional claim rather than a sweeping one: trade diplomacy is trade-enhancing, and disproportionately so for developing economies, but whether that additional trade becomes additional growth depends on what is traded, with whom, and how well the receiving economy is positioned to absorb it.
A Global South Under Strain: The Growth Backdrop to New Delhi
2026 was not a comfortable year for the world economy heading into the summit. The IMF’s April 2026 World Economic Outlook, published shortly after the outbreak of a new war in the Middle East, cut its global growth forecast to 3.1% for the year and revised global inflation up to 4.4%, a sharp reversal of the disinflation trend that had held since 2024.[11], [12] By July, the Fund’s update trimmed 2026 growth further, to 3.0%, while projecting a stronger rebound of 3.4% for 2027,[13] i.e., a path some commentary has since described as V-shaped: a weaker year now, a firmer recovery next.[14]
What matters more for a piece on the Global South is how unevenly that pain is distributed. Both the IMF and the World Bank stress that energy-importing emerging markets and low-income countries absorb a disproportionate share of the shock through higher energy and food prices and wider external financing spreads, while Gulf oil exporters and the United States have so far proved comparatively resilient.[15], [16] The World Bank’s January 2026 Global Economic Prospects report, published before the war but already grim in tone, put the structural picture starkly: Chief Economist Indermit Gill warned that the 2020s are on track to be the weakest decade for global growth since the 1960s and noted that roughly half of all developing economies have failed since 2019 to narrow the income gap with the world’s richest countries.[17]
The two institutions do not even fully agree on how bad the picture is, which is itself informative. The World Bank’s own January 2026 report had initially projected 2.6% global growth for the year before the war forced downward revisions across roughly two-thirds of the world’s economies,[18] leaving a gap of roughly half a percentage point between the IMF’s 3.0% reference forecast and the World Bank’s more cautious number, a disagreement that, on both institutions’ own account, reflects different assumptions about how long the war’s trade and energy effects will persist, rather than a dispute over its severity.[19] For Global South governments trying to plan around either figure, that uncertainty is itself a cost, and one more reason diversifying growth strategies, including through deeper South-South trade, has climbed up the policy agenda.
This is the backdrop against which New Delhi’s trade diplomacy has to be judged. Multilateral aid budgets are tight, advanced-economy growth is itself faltering, and, as the New Delhi Declaration’s own language on unilateral tariffs makes clear, the rules-based trading system that Global South exporters have relied on since the 1990s is under sustained strain.[20] In that context, whatever trade-facilitating value BRICS diplomacy can deliver is not a marginal add-on to an otherwise healthy growth outlook; for several members, it is one of the few remaining policy levers still within reach.
The New Delhi Declaration: A Practical Layer for Trade Cooperation
Reaffirming Multilateralism Against Unilateral Tariffs
On trade specifically, the Declaration reaffirms support for an open, rules-based multilateral system centered on the WTO, while criticizing the spread of unilateral tariffs and non-tariff measures that it argues are disrupting global commerce and supply chains.[21], [22] The declaration expresses serious concern over indiscriminate tariff increases and protectionist measures, including those justified on environmental grounds. It calls on WTO members to reform the institution, not abandon it,[23] a line consistent with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s repeated argument, across several BRICS summits, that the bloc should seek reform of existing global institutions rather than positioning itself as a replacement for them.[24] Notably, the text names neither the United States nor any individual government, even as it responds implicitly to a wave of tariff actions and to prior threats of retaliatory tariffs against BRICS states over currency cooperation.[25]
Local-Currency Settlement, Not a Common Currency
One of the more consequential clarifications in the 2026 text concerns money. The New Delhi Declaration is not a launchpad for a common BRICS currency, an idea that has circulated and been doubted by economists, including Jim O’Neill, who coined the original BRIC acronym in 2001 for several years.[26] Instead, its economic ambition on this front is narrower and, arguably, more achievable: making trade in national currencies and cross-border payments faster, cheaper and more interoperable.[27] Leaders instructed the BRICS Payments Working Group to continue developing payment mechanisms that are fast, low-cost, accessible, transparent and secure, and to keep studying the interoperability of existing cross-border payment channels and messaging systems.[28] India’s own central bank had pushed, earlier in the chairship, for a shared rail linking central bank digital currencies such as the e-rupee and the digital yuan, explicitly framed as a hedge against dollar-based tariff and sanctions risk; the Declaration’s payments language does not go that far formally, but it keeps that door open for future summits.
The New Development Bank as the Financing Arm
If the Declaration provides the political mandate, the New Development Bank (NDB) supplies the balance sheet behind it. NDB President Dilma Rousseff has confirmed that roughly a quarter of the bank’s lending portfolio is already denominated in the local currencies of its members, a share the bank’s 2022-2026 general strategy targets raising to 30%.[29] The bank’s membership has itself been expanding steadily: founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, it added Bangladesh and the UAE in 2021, Egypt in 2023, Algeria in 2025 and, on 5 June 2026, Uzbekistan as its tenth member and first from Central Asia, with Iran’s central bank signalling its own intention to join.[30] What distinguishes an NDB loan from a comparable World Bank facility, in practice, is speed and the absence of policy conditionality: approvals move faster, and increasingly, borrowers get paid in their own currency, not dollars.[31] For Global South borrowers, this is, in effect, competition among lenders, and for a bank of the NDB’s scale, that competition is real even if still modest next to the World Bank’s own lending book.[32] Scale is, admittedly, still the honest caveat here: as of the bank’s most recent public pipeline disclosure, its lending program ran to roughly seventy-six projects worth US$18.2 billion across 2023 and 2024,[33] a meaningful sum for individual borrowing members, but a fraction of what the World Bank Group or China’s bilateral lenders disburse in a single year, which is worth remembering before treating the NDB as a ready-made substitute for either.
The Unglamorous Infrastructure Agenda
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the 2026 Declaration, compared with its predecessors, is the attention it pays to the infrastructure behind economic integration rather than to headline announcements alone: payments, trade documentation, MSME finance, supply chains, critical minerals, digital public infrastructure, research networks, start-up funding and transport connectivity all feature in the text.[34] Nobody puts payments plumbing or MSME finance on a summit agenda for the theater. These map closely onto the frictions the economic-diplomacy literature identifies as binding constraints on developing-country trade, information costs, payment risk and documentation delays (Yakop and van Bergeijk, 2011; Van Bergeijk et al. 2010).[35], [36] If trade diplomacy is going to show up in growth data at all, it is more likely to do so through this kind of granular, multi-year plumbing work than through the geopolitical language that dominates summit headlines.
Do the Numbers Back the Diplomacy? Intra-BRICS and South-South Trade
UNCTAD’s dedicated twenty-year assessment of intra-BRICS trade, released around the time of the summit, gives the clearest empirical test of whether two decades of BRICS diplomacy have actually changed the underlying trading relationship among members. Intra-BRICS merchandize trade grew more than thirteen-fold since 2003, from US$84.2 billion to US$1.17 trillion in 2024, expanding at an average annual rate of 13.3%, well above the 5.7% recorded for global trade and the 9.5% recorded for South-South trade generally over the same period.[37]
That headline growth, however, sits alongside a much less flattering ratio. Despite the thirteen-fold increase, intra-BRICS trade still accounts for only around 5% of world trade and roughly 20% of South-South trade, even though BRICS members together represent close to 68% of the entire Global South’s GDP.[38], [39] That gap is the real story here: a grouping worth two-thirds of the Global South’s GDP still trades remarkably little with itself. UNCTAD does not read this as a ceiling. Its proposed fix is a “Trade+” strategy, an actual BRICS-wide trade agreement, paired with coordinated macro-finance, digital and industrial policy, to push the bloc past informal cooperation.[40]
Scaled against the wider world economy, the numbers look smaller still. Global trade crossed US$35 trillion for the first time in 2025, with UNCTAD’s own trade update flagging weaker momentum ahead for 2026 as debt, higher trade costs, and persistent uncertainty weigh on performance.[41] Intra-BRICS trade’s US$1.17 trillion is a respectable share of that total, but it is worth being precise about what it is not: not a parallel trading system insulated from the pressures buffeting global commerce generally, and not yet the kind of deeply institutionalized bloc-level market that would justify treating BRICS trade diplomacy as a genuine alternative, rather than a complement, to the multilateral system its own Declaration says it wants to reform.[42]
China anchors the network as both the largest exporter and importer within intra-BRICS trade, which says as much about what this trade actually consists of as it does about its size. Several other members remain structurally dependent on BRICS markets specifically for exports of primary products rather than manufactured goods.[43], [44] India offers an instructive, and less flattering, illustration of this pattern. Its exports to BRICS partners grew from US$10.5 billion in 2003 to US$81.7 billion in 2024, a real achievement on paper;[45] but its imports have become far more concentrated within the bloc over the same period, with BRICS members supplying 42% of India’s total imports by 2024,[46] and China alone accounting for roughly US$109 billion of Indian imports against only about US$15 billion of exports the other way, a trade relationship in which India’s imports from BRICS partners grew at a 24% compound annual rate between 2020 and 2024, against 11% for its exports.[47] The one genuinely encouraging thread in India’s numbers is compositional rather than volumetric: UNCTAD’s data show medium- and high-technology goods (pharmaceuticals, automotive parts, electronics) rising from 26% to 43% of India’s intra-BRICS export basket between 2003 and 2024, while the combined share of labor-intensive and primary products fell from 59% to 49% over the same period.[48] That is precisely the kind of upgrading the growth-theory literature treats as the difference between trade that compounds and trade that merely accumulates; it also suggests the picture is not uniformly discouraging, even if it remains the exception rather than the rule among BRICS members still exporting mostly primary commodities to one another.[49]
Zahonogo’s (2016) threshold finding isn’t just theory here. Rapid trade growth concentrated in primary products and skewed toward a single dominant partner is close to the pattern his sub-Saharan African evidence links to diminishing growth returns, not compounding ones.[50] Diplomacy that expands trade volume without shifting its composition risks locking parts of the Global South into the flatter, less rewarding segment of that curve, even as the headline trade figures continue to climb.
The Limits of Declaratory Diplomacy
Even sympathetic readings of the New Delhi Declaration acknowledge an implementation gap. One widely read analysis of the text notes plainly that declarations generate norms and proposals, but that their real-world effectiveness depends on financing, institutional capacity and national follow-through, none of which a summit report can itself guarantee. The same analysis points to a deeper structural issue: BRICS members differ substantially in political systems, economic structures and foreign-policy priorities, and the bloc’s consensus-based decision-making, while useful for holding together a genuinely diverse membership, tends to slow the implementation of its more ambitious initiatives.[51]
Geopolitical heterogeneity is not a hypothetical risk to that implementation; it is already visible inside the bloc’s own financing arm. The New Development Bank suspended new business in Russia in March 2022 in order to protect its own access to international capital markets, even though Russia is a founding member and a Board-level shareholder.[52] Iran, meanwhile, is actively pursuing NDB membership while under Western sanctions and at war, meaning a candidacy that, whatever its outcome, illustrates how far apart individual BRICS members can be on the basic question of what the bank, and the bloc more broadly, is for.[53] A trade-diplomacy agenda that depends on consensus among members with that much daylight between their circumstances is unlikely to move at the pace its own communiqués suggest, whatever the underlying economic logic for cooperation.
That does not make the trade-relevant commitments worthless. The payments interoperability track and the NDB’s local-currency lending targets have measurable multi-year trajectories, not one-off pledges, and future summits can in principle be checked against actual disbursement and settlement data.[54] But it does mean that translating the New Delhi Declaration into Global South growth is a multi-year administrative and financial undertaking, not a summit-week event.
Conclusion
Put the opening question plainly: yes, but conditionally, and the condition is doing most of the work. This is not the enthusiastic case the Declaration’s own language makes for itself, nor the dismissive case made by its harshest critics. The literature is reasonably clear that diplomacy of this kind is trade-enhancing, and disproportionately so for developing economies facing higher information and trust costs than their OECD counterparts.[55], [56] The summit itself produced commitments on payments interoperability, on local-currency NDB lending, and on the unglamorous infrastructure of trade documentation and MSME finance that are more concrete than the diplomatic theater surrounding them.[57]
Yet the same data that makes the case for New Delhi’s practical ambitions also disciplines expectations about how quickly they can deliver. A trading bloc that represents two-thirds of the Global South’s GDP but only a fifth of its internal trade has, by definition, a great deal of integration left to build,[58], [59] and much of the trade growth achieved so far remains concentrated in primary products and in relationships heavily skewed toward a single dominant partner, precisely the composition that the growth-theory literature associates with diminishing, rather than compounding, returns to openness (Zahonogo, 2016).[60]
The most useful forecast, then, is not whether trade diplomacy “works” in the abstract, but whether the specific, unglamorous commitments made in New Delhi, interoperable payments, the NDB’s 30% local-currency lending target, a possible intra-BRICS trade agreement along the lines UNCTAD has proposed, are still being tracked, financed and reported on this time next year. Given the depth of the growth challenge facing much of the Global South through 2026 and 2027,[61], [62] that is a test worth taking seriously, even if New Delhi’s own Declaration cannot yet be said to have passed it.
Trade diplomacy of the New Delhi variety is not a substitute for domestic reform. It is not empty signalling either. It is a set of options: cheaper cross-border payments, financing without policy strings, and a slightly wider set of export markets. Whether any of that ends up mattering will be decided less in Bharat Mandapam than in eleven finance ministries, over the next several years.
[1] BRICS, “BRICS INDIA 2026 – Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” https://www.brics2026.gov.in.
[2] “New Delhi Declaration Adopted At BRICS Summit 2026: What Are The Key Takeaways,” Outlook India, September 13, 2026, https://www.outlookindia.com/national/new-delhi-declaration-adopted-what-are-the-key-takeaways.
[3] “BRICS Summit 2026: 11 Key Takeaways From the New Delhi Declaration,” Forbes India, September 13, 2026, https://www.forbesindia.com/article/news/brics-summit-2026-11-key-takeaways-from-the-new-delhi-declaration/2998249/1.
[4] “BRICS New Delhi Declaration: India Pushes Trade, Tech and Reform,” TICE News, September 12, 2026, https://www.tice.news/business-finance-economy-and-corporate-news/brics-new-delhi-declaration-trade-tech-global-reform-12524984.
[5] “18th BRICS Summit in New Delhi: Key Highlights and Unanimous Declaration,” ICT Frame, September 13, 2026, https://ictframe.com/18th-brics-summit-in-new-delhi/
[6] Yakop, M. and Peter A. G. van Bergeijk, “Economic diplomacy, trade and developing countries,” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society 4, no. 2 (July 2011): 253-267.
[7] Idem.
[8] van Bergeijk, P., MEH van Veenstra, and M. Yakop, “Economic diplomacy, the level of development and trade,” Discussion Papers in Diplomacy, (119), 2010.
[9] ECDPM, “Economic diplomacy and South-South trade: A new issue in development,” GREAT Insights, Volume 3, Issue 3, March 25, 2024, https://ecdpm.org/work/new-diplomacy-and-development-volume-3-issue-3-march-2014/economic-diplomacy-and-south-south-trade-a-new-issue-in-development.
[10] Zahonogo, P., “Trade and economic growth in developing countries: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa,” Journal of African Trade 3, no. 1-2 (2016): 41-56.
[11] International Monetary Fund, “World Economic Outlook, April 2026: Global Economy in the Shadow of War,” April 2026, https://www.imf.org/en/publications/weo/issues/2026/04/14/world-economic-outlook-april-2026.
[12] “IMF & World Bank 2026 Global Economic Outlook: Growth, Inflation, Debt,” The Economy, September 9, 2026, https://economy.com.pk/imf-world-bank-2026-global-economic-outlook/.
[13] International Monetary Fund, “World Economic Outlook Update, July 2026,” June 25, 2026, https://www.imf.org/en/publications/weo.
[14] “IMF & World Bank 2026 Global Economic Outlook: Growth, Inflation, Debt.”
[15] “IMF & World Bank 2026 Global Economic Outlook: Growth, Inflation, Debt.”
[16] “World Bank & IMF Reports 2026: Why the “3% Growth” Consensus Is Actually a Debate,” The Economy, September 13, 2026, https://economy.com.pk/world-bank-imf-reports-2026/.
[17] “World Bank & IMF Reports 2026: Why the “3% Growth” Consensus Is Actually a Debate.”
[18] Idem.
[19] Idem.
[20] Prime Minister of India, “BRICS New Delhi Declaration: Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability,” September 12, 2026, https://www.pmindia.gov.in/en/news_updates/brics-new-delhi-declaration-building-for-resilience-innovation-cooperation-and-sustainability-september-12-2026/.
[21] “BRICS New Delhi Declaration: India Pushes Trade, Tech and Reform.”
[22] “BRICS 2026 Declaration: Currency, Terrorism, Trade & AI – 10 Big Takeaways,” Asian Mirror, September 12, 2026, https://www.asianmirror.us/brics-2026-new-delhi-declaration-takeaways/.
[23] “BRICS countries in India agree to expand settlements in national currencies – South China Morning Post,” UA.News, September 12, 2026, https://ua.news/en/world/krayini-briks-v-indiyi-domovilisia-rozshiriti-rozrakhunki-u-natsvaliutakh-south-china-morning-post.
[24] “BRICS declaration calls for use of local currency to boost trade,” The Tribune, October 24, 2024, https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/brics-declaration-calls-for-use-of-local-currency-to-boost-trade.
[25] “BRICS countries in India agree to expand settlements in national currencies – South China Morning Post.”
[26] “BRICS Currency Ambitions Face Skepticism Despite 2026 Launch Timeline,” BTCC, 2025, https://www.btcc.com/en-US/square/Global%20Cryptocurrency/915967.
[27] “BRICS 2026 Declaration: Currency, Terrorism, Trade & AI – 10 Big Takeaways.”
[28] “BRICS countries in India agree to expand settlements in national currencies – South China Morning Post.”
[29] “BRICS New Development Bank expands local currency lending and green finance,” TV BRICS, 2026, https://tvbrics.com/en/news/brics-new-development-bank-expands-local-currency-lending-and-green-finance/.
[30] “Iran Says It Will Join the BRICS Bank – Bank Can’t Confirm,” Rio Times Online, August 27, 2026, https://www.riotimesonline.com/ndb-members-who-can-join-2026/
[31] “New Development Bank Members Stay in Limbo as Iran Waits and Colombia Stalls,” Rio Times Online, September 4, 2026, https://www.riotimesonline.com/new-development-bank-members-join-rules-2026/.
[32] Idem.
[33] “BRICS bank to increase membership, finance in local currencies, says president,” Malay Mail, August 25, 2023, https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2023/08/25/brics-bank-to-increase-membership-finance-in-local-currencies-says-president/87208.
[34] “BRICS New Delhi Declaration: India Pushes Trade, Tech and Reform.”
[35] Yakop and van Bergeijk, “Economic diplomacy, trade and developing countries.”
[36] van Bergeijk, Veenstra, and Yakop, “Economic diplomacy, the level of development and trade.”
[37] UNCTAD, “Two decades of intra-BRICS trade: Trends, patterns and policies,” 2026, https://unctad.org/publication/two-decades-intra-brics-trade-trends-patterns-and-policies.
[38] Idem.
[39] “UNCTAD: Two Decades of Intra-BRICS Trade,” The Policy Edge, March 6, 2026, https://www.policyedge.in/p/unctad-two-decades-of-intra-brics-trade.
[40] Idem.
[41] “Global trade to exceed $35 trillion in 2025 for the first time,” Gulf News, December 10, 2025, https://gulfnews.com/business/economy/global-trade-to-exceed-35-trillion-in-2025-for-the-first-time-1.500375226.
[42] Prime Minister of India, “BRICS New Delhi Declaration: Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability.”
[43] “BRICS Summit 2026: How the grouping is reshaping the global economic order,” DD India, September 9, 2026, https://ddindia.co.in/2026/09/brics-summit-2026-how-the-grouping-is-reshaping-the-global-economic-order/
[44] “BRICS at 20: How grouping reshapes global economic order,” New Kerala, September 9, 2026, https://www.newkerala.com/news/a/brics-summit-2026-how-grouping-reshaping-global-economic-686.htm.
[45] “UNCTAD: Two Decades of Intra-BRICS Trade.”
[46] Idem.
[47] “Datanomics: Laying strong foundation Bric(s) by Bric(s) for global ties,” Business Standard, July 7, 2025, https://www.business-standard.com/world-news/laying-strong-foundation-bric-s-by-bric-s-125070700681_1.html
[48] “UNCTAD: Two Decades of Intra-BRICS Trade.”
[49] UNCTAD, “Two decades of intra-BRICS trade: Trends, patterns and policies.”
[50] Zahonogo, “Trade and economic growth in developing countries: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa.”
[51] “BRICS New Delhi Declaration 2026,” ClearIAS, September 13, 2026, https://www.clearias.com/brics-new-delhi-declaration-2026/.
[52] “Iran Says It Will Join the BRICS Bank – Bank Can’t Confirm.”
[53] Idem.
[54] “BRICS New Development Bank expands local currency lending and green finance.”
[55] Yakop and van Bergeijk, “Economic diplomacy, trade and developing countries.”
[56] van Bergeijk, Veenstra, and Yakop, “Economic diplomacy, the level of development and trade.”
[57] “BRICS New Delhi Declaration: India Pushes Trade, Tech and Reform.”
[58] UNCTAD, “Two decades of intra-BRICS trade: Trends, patterns and policies,” 2026, https://unctad.org/publication/two-decades-intra-brics-trade-trends-patterns-and-policies
[59] “UNCTAD: Two Decades of Intra-BRICS Trade.”
[60] Zahonogo, “Trade and economic growth in developing countries: Evidence from sub-Saharan Africa.”
[61] International Monetary Fund “World Economic Outlook Update, July 2026.”
[62] “World Bank & IMF Reports 2026: Why the “3% Growth” Consensus Is Actually a Debate.”
