Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill coined the BRIC acronym in a paper from 2001 ('Building Better Global Economic BRICs’). He predicted that the share of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) in the world's economic pie would grow in the following decade and as such also their role in global economic governance. In a follow-up paper in 2003 Goldman Sachs predicted that by 2040 the ‘BRIC’ countries collectively would be economically bigger than the traditional G6 (U.S., Japan, Germany, France, UK and Italy).

The BRIC acronym took on a life of its own with an associated cottage industry of economic and political analysis. Currently various entities from research centers to investment funds have ‘BRIC’ in their names. In 2009 the leaders of the BRIC nations held their first summit in Russia, which have since become regular events. In 2010 the leaders of the BRIC nations invited South Africa to join them and the South African President attended summits in 2011 and 2012 as a full member with the group being renamed as BRICS. The rationale for this is that although the South African population is relatively small (around 50 million), it is the largest economy in Africa and often the leading political actor in the African Union.

In addition to summits at Heads of State level, regular gatherings take place between foreign- and finance ministers in the run-up to important meetings of international organizations (e.g. UN General Assembly, World Bank, G20, International Monetary Fund, WTO, etc.). Topics discussed include, inter alia, the global financial crisis and the reform of the financial system, food security, the Arab Spring, the Syrian crisis, the WTO Doha round, and many others. Many analysts have proposed other similar groupings of states that could play dominant geo-economic roles in the future, such as the MIKT (Mexico, Indonesia, South Korea, Turkey) coined by Goldman Sachs and TIMBI (Turkey, India, Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia) by Prof. J. Goldstone. Within the BRICS, cooperation between more democratic India, Brazil and South Africa has often taken place under the banner of the IBSA Dialogue Forum, while less democratic (and permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, UNSC) China and Russia have collaborated within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which also includes several Central Asian states.