BRIC countries make up only about 40 percent of the GDP of all emerging markets worldwide: the organizing concept behind the Center for Emerging Markets' sixth annual symposium, “Beyond the BRICs.”
“It's important to recognize that beyond the BRICS, there are countries with fairly large populations and economies such as Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, and Turkey that are contenders for investments from U.S. companies and others in the West,” said Ravi Ramamurti, director of the Center for Emerging Markets. “With Brazil and Russia stumbling, it seems even more relevant to ask which other countries companies ought to be looking at.”
Co-organized with Cornell University's Emerging Markets Institute, the symposium featured keynote speaker Jonathan Berman, a fellow of the Milken Institute Center for Financial Markets and former senior partner at Dalberg, a strategy consulting firm focused on frontier markets. Berman focused on Africa's growth, driven by improvements in education, governance, and connectivity.