The world in 2050: Beyond the BRICs: A broader look at emerging market growth prospects.

In March 2006 we published a report highlighting the rapid growth and increasing global significance of what we called the ‘E7’ emerging economies: the ‘BRIC’ economies of China, India, Brazil and Russia, plus Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey. In this article,we update our economic growth projections to take into account the latest available data and extend the analysis to include 13 other emerging economies. Together with the 17 largest economies considered in our earlier report, this new ‘PwC 30’ grouping of countries account for around 85% of world economic output. In our updated base case projections, the E7 emerging economies will by 2050 be around 50% larger than the current G7 (US, Japan, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Canada). China is expected to overtake the US as the largest economy in around 2025 in these updated projections, while India is now assessed as having the potential nearly to catch up with the US by 2050 (see Table A below). We are now even more optimistic than in our original 2006 report about these two economies given their recent very strong performance.